


The Primeval Devourer Rewritten

by Tziput13



Category: Powerpuff Girls
Genre: Action/Adventure, Adventure, Biology, Gen, Injury, Sci-Fi Elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-12
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:01:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22225297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tziput13/pseuds/Tziput13
Summary: The Amoeba Boys have been a pitiful trio of villains among Townsville’s worst for a long time, but they know nothing of the secret that is hidden inside their bodies, a nightmare from the past that has waited a long while for the chance to take back what was its. The Powerpuff Girls will have to face one of their hardest challenges yet to defeat this primordial foe.
Kudos: 1





	1. Awakening

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Primeval Devourer (Original)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3434657) by [PonderingWriter (Tziput13)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tziput13/pseuds/PonderingWriter). 



> This story is a full rewriting of one of my first fanfictions. While I have retouched my older stories here and there throughout the last few years, 'The Primeval Devourer' was the only one that I left as it was, never editing it (not even a word) since I first posted it. I personally feel like it's the story that has aged worse among my earlier ones, in ways that would require more than just some grammar fixes to improve on. Rewriting it is what will work the best for the sake of the premise, at least in my opinion: the premise itself and some sections will remain the same plot-wise, mainly in the first and last sections, but otherwise you can expect substantial changes: the middle-part will be mostly rebuilt from the ground-up.
> 
> Hopefully, I will manage to do justice to the original idea of the fic I posted more than six years ago.
> 
> February 2021: due to some of the content in later chapters, rating was changed from G to T.

The city of Townsville… how beautiful it is!

A city where everyone walks on the sidewalks with beaming smiles, ready to tackle the new day head on. Where a day at work is a source of pride instead of stress. Where a citizen wouldn't hesitate to help you out in case you needed a little tip on how to navigate the metropolis.

True, indeed… unless we include the villains in the picture, of course.

Because yes, despite the overall cheerful attitude of Townsville's citizens, even here we have evil doers up to no good. From the humblest burglars to the grand evil genius dwelling on the volcano, this city is no different from other metropolises in the world, and, sadly, the activities of said subjects often make living in Towsnville harderthan it looks. All of them might ruin your day when you don't expect it!

All of them… except for the Amoeba Boys, of course. The most pathetic, pitiful criminals to probably have ever existed on the planet, who had somehow managed to get themselves sent to prison. The massive orange heist event did manage to give a headache to the city, after all.

And right now, here they were… leaving jail, with a guard letting them go with a rare smile on his face. "We'll miss you guys! Try to behave like that and we stay on good terms!" he said as they departed.

The Amoeba Boys didn't answer, but instead just slimed forward without a word. At least, Slim and Jr. did, because Bossman seemed to be quite distressed. Once they were out of ear range from the prison, in fact, he suddenly turned towards his two mates and started to shout in anger.

"You nincompoops! I asked you to do _one thing_ while behind the bars: act as a rough guy! Meet up with our fellow criminals and make the right deals with the right wardens! And just keep being the bad guy we had _just_ managed to become… and what do I get? Being released on _parole for good behaviour!"_

"But Boss! We did all we could!" Slim protested weakly.

"All?! All you managed to do in one month was writing on the _cell wall!"_

"We're sorry, Boss! We just believed it was a good idea to use those chalks we found. We had no idea they were presents… besides, the other criminals were already doing it!"

Bossman grumbled under his breath. He was wasting time. "Bah, let's just… forget about it. We're back to square one… now we need another good idea to build our reputation up and show everyone the great masterminds we are."

The Amoeba Boys started to think deeply, and it took them two minutes before Jr. suddenly lighted up. "I know! Let's steal all the lemons!"

Bossman's answer was a smack on his head.

"No more fruits!"

"How about the vegeta… bles…" Slim shrunk as Bossman glared at him in annoyance.

"If I hear one more word about plant-related crimes I will not be responsible for my actions!" he said. "We need something more than that, boys. Something that may be able to terrorize Townsville and its inhabitants… like that Mojo guy does."

"You mean, like, a giant robot?" Slim remarked.

"It'd be a start, but I'm sure we can be more original, and _do better,_ than that!" Bossman replied. "C'mon, boys, I know we can get some wild ideas if we focus enough! We need something so big and terrifying that no one will be able to forget it… not anytime soon!"

Slim and Jr. clapped their pseudopodia, approving their boss' encouragement. Then, the three of them started to mumble incoherent sentences and words under their breaths, as they thought and thought about what they wanted to do. This time, they stayed immobile like that for a total of ten minutes, and a random citizen even considered asking them if they were all right when he saw them out in the open, not moving and with vacuous gazes, as immersed as they were in their pondering.

They would have stayed like that for even longer if it weren't for Bossman who at one moment, made a sudden movement with his head, as if he had suddenly found the right idea. Forgetting about what they were thinking (the void), Jr. and Slim turned their faces towards him, expecting their boss to finally reveal his grand scheme.

But when Bossman looked back, they did not find his usual determined demeanour that he assumed once a great plan had settled in his mind. No… he looked confused by their looks, in fact. But most of all, he looked _lost._

Slim was the first to dare break the ice. "Boss… I don't think we'll be able to do anything if we can't think of something to do first…"

In other circumstances Bossman would have pounced on him, but instead he simply groaned without protests, while Jr. nodded his head.

"Ugh. I can't believe I'm saying this…" Bossman conceded. "You're right. We can't let that stop us, though! We were _almost_ there, boys! We were sent to jail, we had the respect we wanted, we even had our own wanted posters at some point! We can do this! We just need to… to…"

Bossman's speech was interrupted by a fourth voice.

"You just need some help, I suppose?" the disembodied stranger ended the amoeba's sentence, startling him and his companions. "I agree with you, Bossman. You and your goons have potential to be great criminals. In fact, I believe that you, Amoeba Boys, have inside you the ability to commit one of the worst crimes that could ever be achieved in this city… and even beyond!"

The voice progressively became more and more persuasive as it spoke. "You said it yourself. You just need a little help… help that _I can give you._ Because, let me be frank about it… your current reputation, despite your recent success, still has room for improvement."

The Amoeba Boys, who were completely out of the loop about what was going on, saw crimson clouds appear all around them. Then, right in front of them, the clouds dispersed, their place being substituted by a liquid-like vertical surface. Entrapped, the three amoebas approached the surface, which soon started to have images twirl over it. Images of people they knew.

Then, they became able to hear even what was going across the 'mirror' of sorts.

* * *

"Don't be ridiculous! Him is the worst of all of our enemies," Blossom said.

"Maybe, but you keep underestimating Mojo! That chimp manages to get a new plan to conquer a world every twenty-four hours! And almost _no repeats!"_ Buttercup replied.

"What about Fuzzy, guys? He can sure be a bad guy, when he loses it! Besides, he's rude… and I don't like the way he looks!" Bubbles said, entering the conversation.

"Bubbles… we're talking about the evillest villain here, not the _ugliest_ one…" Blossom said in annoyance.

The girls were currently sitting in the centre of the living room, right in front of the TV. The channel was currently broadcasting cartoons, but the girls were too concentrated on their arguing to actually pay attention at the on-going show.

In fact, they were talking so animatedly to each other that even Professor Utonium, who was sitting in his armchair, eventually decided to express his own opinion on the matter.

"Girls, why the sudden interest in classifying your enemies? I don't think it really matters in end, who is eviler and who is less evil."

The girls looked at the Professor in confusion. "Why?" Blossom questioned.

"I believe that, in the end, what is really important is you being able to beat them, since they're all bad guys," the Professor said. "No matter the odds, no matter how difficult your next foe or brilliant the next plan of the current villain will be, you've always come out of it. Isn't that so?"

Blossom nodded, smiling at the Professor, while Buttercup grumbled to herself. "Oh, the drama. We were just trying to do some power analysis or something, Professor!"

"Did we?" Blossom looked at Buttercup quizzically. "I thought we were talking about who was the evilest, meanest one of them?"

"Well, you thought wrong, sis," Buttercup replied, crossing her hands. Blossom frowned.

Bubbles immediately sensed the approaching argument, and decided to intervene. "Hey girls, maybe the Professor is right and we don't need to talk about this that seriously. How about this, we can talk about our worst, weakest enemies?"

Blossom and Buttercup looked at her, then at each other. Buttercup had to hold in a chortle.

"That would be… a pretty fast discussion. Don't you think?" Blossom said. Bubbles scratched her chin to a moment, then she realized what her sister meant.

"Oh… you're right, we don't have much to talk about here. Of course our most _pathetic_ foes are the Amoeba Boys!" she declared. Upon hearing 'Amoeba Boys' Buttercup exploded in laughter and started rolling on the floor.

"Hahaha! You… you've got to be kidding me! The Amoeba Boys—hahaha! Those things aren't even decent common criminals!"

"They're a fun trio, I'll give them that!" Blossom said, laughing along with Buttercup. "It's always refreshing to laugh _at them,_ hahaha!"

"I gotta agree, Blossom. Too bad they're still trying to be good criminals, I can picture them as the perfect comedians!" Bubbles added. "I almost pity them, haha!"

Even Professor Utonium joined in the fun, the laughter of the girls apparently infecting him as well.

Though, now that they were all laughing together… it sounded less like a laugh and more like a cackle.

* * *

The Amoeba Boys were entrapped by the sight of their sworn enemies laughing… at them. Too confused to notice that the particular evil tone of their voices and mean observations felt unnatural, Slim and Jr. looked as if they had just been betrayed.

Bossman on the other hand felt a different emotion, closer to anger. "Oh, so that's what you three think of us, huh?!" he started, talking as if the girls could hear him through the cloudy vision. "That's what you've always thought deep down, didn't ya? How about this girls—how about we actually show you what we are capable of? What the Amoeba Boys truly could do, if only we wanted to? The most incredible, awe-inducing crime you could never—"

"But Boss… what is it that we can do?" Slim asked, fearful of the possible answer, even more than his boss's reaction to the interruption.

Bossman stopped speaking, glancing in annoyance at Slim, but he didn't reply immediately. He extended some fingers from his pseudopodia and started counting them, deep in thought, then let them return to his body and glanced at Slim again—who was waiting for an answer. He also looked at Jr. for a second.

Then, he looked forward towards the vision, his face the perfect mask of defeat. "I… I don't know."

"Oooh… isn't that sad?" the mysterious, echoing voice resumed to speak again. "Yet, that is the issue I'm afraid, Amoeba Boys. Nobody actually believes in you as actual criminals… but we know that's not the case for us."

The cloud finally started to dissipate, the vision collapsing in on itself and ending the now maniacal laughter of the people featured in it. However, the vapour didn't just dissolve out of thin air without leaving anything behind.

A figure stepped out of it, finally revealing its appearance to the Amoeba Boys. A tall, terrifying villain everyone, _even the amoebas,_ could recognize as he presented himself to them. Questionable dress completed by black boots, red skin and crimson claws… and an evil grin up to boot.

"I happen to believe in you… that you have much more potential that you let others see. You just have to… get to know it, Amoeba Boys," Him said suavely, his devilish smile never faltering. "You just have to let me do my thing, and I'll help you in a way only I can. Wouldn't that be sweet?"

Him's eyes shot red as he gave out a cackle. "To be feared in all of the city of Townsville! Making its inhabitants cower in fear at the mere mention of your name! Isn't that… what you've wanted for so long?"

"YES!" Slim and Jr. jumped in the air jubilantly, immediately agreeing with the demon without reserves.

"It's all we ever wanted, yeah, boss?" Slim continued, clearly too happy to actually note that Bossman didn't share his excitement over Him's offer.

He might have been a single-cellular being, but he had enough 'virtual brains' to remember Him's reputation… well, some of it at least, whatever his cell body could hold in at least. In keeping up his role as the leader, Bossman strived to find something that didn't sound quite right in Him's words, as in to show he was definitely good at making deals and finding undesirable caveats.

"Hold it, you two," he finally managed to blurt out to his fellow gang members. Jr. and Slim receded, their happiness deflating as they took positions by their boss's sides. "Now, you… I mean, 'Him'. I've had some experience in the field and I can tell when there's something fishy. What's the catch, huh?"

The demon didn't seem to be affected by Bossman's accuses as the amoeba kept talking. "Oh, no, let me imagine it, will ya? Since you've _admitted_ we're in fact great criminals, it's clear you want to trick us into using our extraordinary outlaw skills… and then take all the credit! Ah, you think you can just expect us to fall for it? Fat chance, aquarium lobster!"

Him's eye twitched. Yet, he kept his reassuring smile on his face, and took only a couple of seconds to give a reply.

"You… misunderstand my intentions, Amoeba Boys. After all… why would I want to make people fear me… when they already do?"

Well… that logic was impeccable.

"You, on the other hand, don't have the same luck. However, you don't have to worry about it. Once your… _true_ power will be unleashed, you'll become unstoppable."

He approached them and extended a claw towards Bossman's chest, giving a weak prod to the Amoeba's body. "Here, right _here,_ is a gift, my dear primordial friends. Something that will let you do things unimaginable… something that is, unfortunately, inactive and unusable."

His smile somehow grew bigger as he extended his arms out. "I can fix that, and let you make use of it… _all of it._ I just need you to accept my help, and you'll see what I am talking about."

He stayed silent, letting the Amoebas ponder over the tentative offer.

"Boss… I don't want to beg you… but please!" Slim _begged,_ "Please think about it!"

"Yeah, think, think about it!" Jr. repeated.

With his pals trying their best to convince him, and Him having just demolished the only weak point in the offer he'd managed to come up with, Bossman was starting to get tempted as well. It was only by sheer will that he didn't immediately relent… but even then, it was mostly because it was happening too fast and he was starting to get confused.

Releasing a sigh, he decided to ask a couple of additional questions. "Sooo… this gift'majig you've been blabbing about. If we let you help us using it… does that mean we'll be able to do something _badder_ than, huh… stealing oranges?"

"Much, much badder," Him answered without faltering in the slightest. In fact, his eyes lighted up as his eyebrows rose, before going back to his relaxed smiling expression. "Why, it just occurred to me that it won't be just a way to do your 'crime of the century', my dear friends. This will be your opportunity to get your _revenge!"_

The Amoeba Boys looked at Him with neutral gazes, and even the demon took some time to realize they weren't following him at all.

"What I mean is that you'll be able to get back at the very opposite of evil in this town, the self-proclaimed defenders of the city of Townsville… the Powerpuff Girls!"

As soon as he heard 'Powerpuff Girls' from the demon, Bossman's demeanour abruptly changed. His eyes widened in surprise and realization, which quickly gave space to excitement not too dissimilar to Slim and Jr.'s previous reaction. And as soon as he noticed it, Him knew he had him.

"The P-p-powerpuff Girls?!" he exclaimed. "If this thing you're offering us will make them realize what truly up to no good gangsters we are, then it's an occasion we cannot let go to waste, for any reason in the world!"

Slim and Jr. let out cries of both victory and celebration as their boss finally understood… well, they didn't even think about the Powerpuffs before the demon mentioned them, but that was beside the point. They just had yet another good reason to accept Him's help.

"So, how are we going forward with this, Him?" Bossman tentatively questioned. "Gonna make us sign some contract or somethin'?"

Him couldn't help letting out a short laugh. "Oh, no, nothing like that. It'll be rather simple, really."

He extended another claw. "Just shake my hand, and we'll get started before you know it."

The Amoebas exchanged a few, quick glances between themselves. Then, they extended their pseudopodia and touched the claw. It wasn't something that could be described well as a 'shaking of hands', but it was enough for both parties involved.

Him kept his word and, _before they knew it,_ the Amoeba Boys were trapped in the same red vapour clouds that had let them see the vision before. Something took hold of them while they were disoriented by the sudden blindness, and they felt being pulled away.

When the cloud dissipated, neither Him nor the Amoebas were anywhere in sight.

* * *

Bubbles was having trouble sleeping that night.

It didn't matter how hard she'd tried to sleep: sometimes, all she could do was lie on her bed while looking at the ceiling and listening to the soft breathing of her two sisters... and that was the case that night.

As for why that happened, there were quite a lot of reasons.

Sighing, Bubbles decided she had had enough of mentally counting infinite amounts of sheep. She carefully got out of her covers, making sure not to disturb Blossom beside her, then she floated silently away from the bed and out of their room.

Darkness was still an issue to her, but with time Bubbles had learned to at least tolerate it, since she couldn't really live her entire life in fear of every place without light. Mustering some courage, she went downstairs and moved into the kitchen, where she got a bottle of water out of the fridge.

She also picked a glass and poured some water into it, then sat down at the table, looking thoughtfully at it.

Perhaps… she would need to go scouting this night as well. At least she'd have had something to kill time… since staying at bed with her eyes open wasn't going to help her out.

It was a secret habit she had developed since the fiasco with Princess during Christmas had happened, months before. The incident had made Bubbles wary, perhaps too much, of how crime fared during the night as compared to the day. If Princess had managed to easily to sabotage Santa's work, how easy would it be for other criminals to do less spectacular but still bad things?

Sometime after taking care of the Morebucks girl and saving Christmas, those simple worries had turned into annoying, persistent doubts that bothered her during the day, and kept her up at night.

The girls sometimes did some night shifts already, but Bubbles knew that they couldn't do it every single night… in fact, the Professor had made sure to work with the Mayor in order to prevent their crime-fighting jobs from messing with their sleep habits, without leaving Townsville at the mercy of the villains.

It was good enough… but some bad doers always managed to do what they wanted when the girls weren't around. And that bothered her… even if she had been told that the Powerpuff Girls couldn't stay active 24/7. They were still kids, even if with superpowers, and there were only three of them.

It didn't matter. And after some restless nights, she had decided to go scouting by herself, if only to show to herself that there was nothing to worry about. No one knew about this, not Blossom or Buttercup, not the Professor—not even the Mayor was aware of her overtime work as a superhero. Only a few policemen and precinct chiefs that did night duty were aware of it, and Bubbles had made sure to ask them not to share such knowledge as good as they could. She was enough smart to realize that going by herself was dangerous with the villains lurking around, but as long as no one knew or could predict when she would leave she believed she'd stay safe.

The nights away from home had only turned out to be mildly effective as far as crime-fighting was concerned. Bubbles had caught some burglars, stopped a few confrontations from getting violent, with the biggest result being a scouting on Mojo's observatory revealing his next grand scheme to her, still in its initial preparation phase. Poor monkey never knew how the Puffs knew of it beforehand when they burst into his abode and destroyed those Prism Cannons while they were still being built the morning after.

Yet, a lot of her outings had proved to be fruitless, and she ended up spending some nights without doing anything but flying around the city at night. No one to talk with, no one to fight with… literally no one.

She didn't mind it really, deep down. Taking some time off for herself did help from time to time, even if she liked interacting with people!

And leaving for reconnaissance had proved fruitful for her constant worries, at least. The intrusive thoughts had stopped bothering her, but Bubbles hadn't stopped leaving at night. When she felt like it, when she found it hard to close her eyes and fall asleep, she always had this new option. Besides, it wasn't like she stayed out the _entire night._

Just like now. She finally picked her glass and drank it down, placing it down a bit too forcefully in her resolve. She halted, fearing to have made one noise too much, but she heard no footsteps coming from upstairs.

"Okay…" she whispered to herself. "I better get going."

Some moments later, Bubbles, clothed accordingly with her standard dress, left through the bedroom's windows and aimed for the City Centre, making sure to kick her flight into full speed only when she was sure she wouldn't alert her family.

Now, waking them up for nothing wouldn't have been great, would it?

* * *

"Owww… What the heck, Him?! I didn't sign up for some rollercoaster ride!"

Bossoman groaned as he recovered, lamenting his distress. But as he opened his eyes, his most recent ally was nowhere to be seen. Beside him, Slim and Jr. complained for the rather confusing experience as well.

When he finally had to accept that Him wasn't going to greet them anytime soon, Bossman gave a look to their surroundings. They were in some sort of… cavern? Maybe, it was hard to tell considering it was huge, much bigger than anything the Amoeba Boys had ever seen. In fact, it was surprising they could even look around since even they were sure the sky was covered by whatever by the cave's ceiling. A mild, red light illuminated the place, and Bossman noticed that the light came from the very confines of the cavern.

"Whoa…" Slim said, in awe at the sight. "That Him guy sure didn't spare money!"

"Yeah, maybe… still, we don't know yet was he's up to. Him! Yes, I'm talking with you!" Bossman shouted in the distance. "In case you've forgotten, we're here! Now it would be a good time to explain exactly what's all this about our 'gift' you've mentioned!"

Him appeared out of thin air, releasing some crimson smoke as he did. He, of course, startled the Boys, who moved back a little. "Hey! What's with the 'coming out of nowhere'stuff?!"

"I guess you deserve a few words before we begin," Him mused, ignoring the Amoeba's most recent complaints. "I brought you here because it is the perfect place for what we're going to do, for starters. A magma chamber with enough lava, rock and minerals to sustain whatever needs you will have."

"Wait… lava? Isn't that dangerous?"

"Depends on who you are," Him smiled evilly. "You're standing on a platform that is suspended over an entire lava lake, after all. But fear not, my dear friends: it will _help us,_ on the long run."

"Help? That thing below us will melt us like… like cheese!" Bossman shouted, suddenly regretting his past decision to accept Him's help. Even Slim and Jr. were having second thoughts.

It was a shame that they were effectively _trapped._

"Have some faith. It will just take a moment… and then, you will realize that I never lied to you. That my promise… is truth!"

Him suddenly bolted downwards, and with one lobster claw he crashed into the ground. The platform trembled at the impact, the Amoebas crying out in surprise as they wobbled around, but Him didn't mind the possibility for the platform to collapse at all.

In fact, he was smiling. Soon, black filaments started to creep out of the cracks on the ground around him. They were just barely visible streaks at first, but then they grew in number, intertwining with each other and creating more complex structures.

Him's eyes grew bright and yellow as more cracks appeared all around the Amoeba Boys, and more black filaments came out of them, along with red vapour. Bossman, Slim and Jr. closed on each other, but there was nowhere to escape. They weren't the girls… they weren't any of the villains. No flying, jumping or running ability could get them out of this.

Him floated up, some of the black aura following him. "Amoeba Boys!" he announced, getting the attention of the amoebas. "I told you about a gift, hidden inside you, but inactive, useless… dormant. It's time to… _wake it up!"_

He pointed a claw at them, and the black tendrils shot towards the Amoeba Boys. Before they could realize it, the streaks pierced into them.

Except… they didn't feel pain. The streaks simply moved into them, penetrating their cell bodies, and soon fully disappeared into them. Fright was soon replaced by befuddlement.

"What… what was that about exactly?" Bossman wondered out loud.

"Oh…" Him tilted his head, soft amusement cornering his lips.

Then, his eyes became red, and his tone lowered in pitch. _"It's the beginning of the Powerpuff Girls' end."_

Suddenly, the Amoeba Boys… stopped moving. They could only look at each other, unable to move, speak, do anything, but not before long, even that was taken away from them. The last thing they could feel was… something. Something inside them. Growing… takingcontrol of their bodies. The control that was rightfully _its._

The Amoeba Boys fell into the ground. Their eyes had disappeared, and their hats ended up being submerged below the messy liquid of their bodies… which immediately connected, then fused with each other.

Him's evil grin returned as he waited, contemplating the transformation happening in front of him. The cell body was only as big as the three Amoebas were, but then, it started to grow.

The demon could see it consuming the rock below it, as it increased in size, slowly but without stopping. It gave out some fizzling, melting noise as it operated whatever it was doing.

Eventually, Him addressed it, tired of waiting. "You're taking quite your time to get your growth spurts, my friend."

The cell body suddenly froze. It hadn't moved or even rotated an inch, but Him could feel that the creature had diverted its attention away from its feasting.

An idea that proved true when the cell body shot something at him. Him disappeared into a cloud of smoke, and whatever the creature had thrown at him ended up exploding somewhere far away on the platform.

"Oh my! Where are your manners?" Him reappeared in the air, at a safe distance from the cell body. "I'm… impressed. Not to worry, though… I will still make sure that your growth will take only the time strictly needed!"

He raised a claw, and the lava lake below them boomed. Soon, lava streaks came out of the platform's confines and raced for its centre, where the young creature roamed around in distress. The lava was encircled by black streaks and reddish vapour, a tell-tale sign of Him's role in the phenomenon.

Opening his claw, Him grinned. "Your dinner is served, my friend."

The lava shot into the creature, which was unable to even try to avoid it. For all intents and purposes, one would've said that Him had just destroyed it, incinerated under the constant flow of high-temperature, fluid rock. Yet, Him was smiling, his claw rotating in front of himself as he kept controlling the lava flow from the lake up into the platform.

And soon… something became visible below the lava. Something growing, getting bigger faster than any physical law would've deemed possible.

"Yes, yes!" Him cackled. "Grow, become bigger, become stronger!"

And the creature did. Its size increase didn't stop, and at one point Him had to float away, keeping the lava flows still going as the creature became bigger than a small house.

Eventually, Him closed his claw. The lava suddenly stopped, falling back into the lake or onto the platform depending on the placement on the streams, giving out vapour as it melted into the first rock layers of the rocky surface.

At first, the cell body remained immobile. Him didn't move or speak further either, observing the new look he had gifted to the creature. Below the immobile upper 'skin' of it, he could see smaller bodies moving fast and wildly. It was alive.

Then, a loud, unnatural noise was emitted from it, something that could be comparable to a roar, and without notice the creature shot towards him. Even without a face, the demon could tell that it was mad.

' _All the better.'_

The being extruded pseudopodia towards Him, meaning to catch him like he was a butterfly. But Him once again disappeared before it could hit him.

"Now, now, I know you have your reasons, but your hatred is misled." Him's voice echoed throughout the chamber. All he got as a reply was another, more guttural roar.

"There is someone else you should be concerned with," Him's voice kept on speaking, ignoring the loud protests of his only listener. "Someone that will be able to stop you from growing and thriving in the world. Like you used to do, thousands and thousands of years ago… didn't you?"

The creature grew even more restless, but whether that was because it could understand what Him said or just pure, animalistic fury over something it couldn't understand or control was up to debate.

"That would include me, but I have no interest in halting your progress, my dear. Now, the _Powerpuff Girls,_ on the other hand…"

The creature ceased to roar and move around hastily.

"They will try to stop you. They will try to _destroy_ you. They are… the only _obstacle_ between you and total domination on this planet, really. And they've been a thorn on my side for so long… I thought, why not letting you have a second chance? Now…"

Him reappeared in the cave. Right now he was at the confines of the cavern, right in front of one of the walls and floating over the lava lake, since the platform wasn't enough large to cover it all, its edge far. The creature was farther on another side of the magma chamber, but it immediately detected him and started to move as soon as Him resumed his speech.

"I only ask you one thing, my friend. Do me a favour and…" Him's tone grew in tone as his eyes turned red again. His face contorted as he let out a bellow, showing all of his distaste at the mere mention of the targets.

" _Destroy them. Destroy the Puffs… Eradicate the Powerpuff Girls out of the city, out of Earth, once and for all!"_

The creature roared and, mindlessly, jumped out of the platform's edge, its own pseudopodia pushing it into the air and towards Him. Once again, though, the demon vanished into red mist, and the creature only collided with the wall.

Suddenly feeling gravity pulling it down, the being roared its distress out once again, latching on the wall the best it could. It was enough heavy that a couple of spheres fell out of it, down and into the lava lake below, but it successfully managed to not lose its grip with most of its body.

Then, the fizzling noise restarted as the creature consumed the rock material around it. Soon, it dug its way into the wall, and in no time, there was a tank-sized hole in the wall, the cell body having disappeared in the darkness inside it.

Some distant, echoing laughing was heard in the magma chamber… and after that, it remained silent.


	2. Cell Growth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for taking a while to update. This story is my next big focus so hopefully I can manage to not spend as much time on new chapters as it happened for this one.

It had been an hour and a half since Bubbles had left home for her most recent solitary night shift. As of now, her search hadn't led to any crime-fighting, as the city looked to be as calm as it could be throughout the night… well, it was true for the the districts she had checked up until now at least.

Yet, she knew she couldn't just check the entire metropolis. First, because the city was huge and she was alone, and second… because it was still a night shift.

Bubbles let out a yawn, unable to contain it any longer. She was beginning to get sleepy, which was in fairness one of her goals for the night. Considering that there was nothing to worry about as far as she could see, all she could do was going back home and get a couple of hours of sleep before the next morning.

Thus, she halted her flight and took a moment to stretch herself out, before turning around and flying in the general direction of the outskirts where her home was.

It was rather surprising, therefore, for Bubbles to hear screams in the distance.

After a brief second of hesitance, Bubbles zapped towards the origin of the sounds. She could hear more screaming in the distance… whatever was going on, it had to be serious. No time to go back and warn her sisters about it!

After a couple of turns at intersections and some seconds spent in flight, she finally arrived at her destination: one of the main avenues of Townsville. No one was on the street, as expected given what she'd seen during her previous reconnaissance patrol. The screams were coming from a building on the side, the base of a skyscraper in fact. Bubbles could even see people at the windows screaming their hearts out in the night, calling for help like their life depended on it. Which may have been the case…

Only when she carefully looked at the very foundations of the building did Bubbles understand why the citizen where so frightened.

 _Something_ was doing… something. Bubbles was unable to connect the image she was seeing to anything she had memory of, animals or monsters alike: it was a... a messy cluster of… something liquid?

It was hard for her to describe. The thing was only slightly greyish in colour, but in fact its body was mostly transparent, and below its 'skin' she could see something else moving fast and, apparently, at random, multiple objects in fact. Yet, the most striking feature was the lack of body parts: it was a shapeless mould of… whatever it was made of. The only hint at it being alive was that it was doing something at the skyscraper… something damaging.

Bubbles could see it now: it was consuming the foundations of the building, somehow, and it had gotten pretty far into the lower floor. The entire building gave a wobble, which in turn made the people above let out even more terrified screams.

"Bubbles! Bubbles!" a woman shouted when she saw the Powerpuff Girl hovering in the street. "Help us!"

She didn't let her say it twice. Floating towards the creature, Bubbles scowled at the thing, but she still decided to talk to it first. No harm done in trying to get this sorted out without a fight.

"Hey, you! You… whatever kind of monster you are!" Bubbles called out. "Stop it! You're scaring the wits out of the people in it!"

The creature didn't budge, and simply went deeper into the building. Bubbles could hear the fizzling of metal and concrete from behind the body of it.

"Hey, rude! I'm talking with you! HEY!"

Finally, she finally managed to get its attention… at least, it looked like so. The fizzling stopped, but the creature didn't turn around at all. It simply froze, seemingly having just crashed like an old pinball game shaken one time too much.

Yet… Bubbles could feel that it hadn't just stopped in confusion, or even died on the spot. No… it was still there.

She felt like… it was observing her.

Then, without a notice, something sprouted out of the creature, a tentacle of sorts made out of the same material that composed the monster, aiming for Bubbles. Yelping in surprise, Bubbles dashed out of the way before the pseudopodium could grab her.

It didn't end here though. Bubbles looked at the thing just in time to see it bolting out of the skyscraper at surprising speed, sliding towards her. She flew upwards before it could reach her, putting some much needed safe distance between herself and it.

More pseudopodia appeared out of the creature, but Bubbles simply flew a bit farther and easily avoided them. Now that it was in the centre of the street, Bubbles could take in the size of the monster—slightly _bigger_ than a standard house in the outskirts of Townsville. Definitely large, but not as big as some of the giant robots, hulking monsters and other foes she had to deal with in the past.

"You're a big, fat, mean blob, don't you know?!" Bubbles shouted. Her eyes lighted up as she charged up her eyebeams. "Somebody ought to teach you how to behave!"

She fired her heat vision at the creature, which didn't even try to avoid it. The beams hit it head on, and the creature finally gave some kind of animalistic trait out—a loud, guttural roar of distress and pain.

This new monster was quite peculiar, but Bubbles was confident she could take it on by herself. She kept firing eyebeams at it, but it soon appeared that the creature was a fast learner, as it started to zig-zag around the street, evading her shots. At one point, it also started to move away from her.

"Hey, come back here!" Bubbles didn't know if the monster was taking its leave already, but since the current intentions of the blob-thing weren't clear, she decided to follow it to at least make sure it indeed wanted to leave Townsville—and make it clear they weren't welcome. She dashed away, leaving behind a streak of light blue as she flew after it.

While the creature was surprisingly fast, Bubbles' own speed was more than enough to keep up with it. For a minute, they played a cat and mouse game, the monster repeatedly changing directions and taking sharp turns into different streets.

Bubbles fired her eyebeams whenever she had a clear shot and managed to land more hits on the thing—as confirmed by the loud growls of protest coming from the monster. It wasn't slowing down though.

"You can't escape me, meane! Get back here!" Bubbles shouted after it, but the monster's answer was literally just taking another turn.

The thing was… they were in a straight street with no intersections. The monster literally turned into a building.

The thing lasted for less than three seconds, but it was enough to take Bubbles aback. The monster _disappeared_ into the wall… it happened so fast, she could do nothing but reach its last position, mouth agape.

"How!? Where—" she halted when she noticed something. An alley…

It was an alley that brought to the parallel street on the other side of the block. Yet, it was also a quite narrow alley of sorts, no wider than five meters.

Even so, as she focused her eyes, Bubbles clearly saw the monster sliding its way through it before disappearing beyond the exit on the other side. Somehow, the beast had managed to squeeze itself into that small of a space and go right through to reach the other side…

Recomposing itself, Bubbles flew upwards until she was over the buildings and moved over to the other street. As she expected, the monster was nowhere to be seen.

' _Dang, I lost it!'_ she thought as she looked around, trying to locate anything that could lead her to the current location of the beast. It was hard, though, in the darkness of the late night while helped only by the artificial illumination of the city, and while the monster was big, it could easily hide behind the tall buildings of this city block.

She slowly hovered down, hoping to find something that could lead her back on the pursuit. _'Perhaps it leaves something slimy behind itself like snails. Ick…'_

It was that or going back home as fast as she could to warn her sisters. If the monster was to be found while searching at random, it would've been better to look for it with the full team on the case.

Bubbles wasn't able to see anything weird or wet on the ground as she moved down at first. Apparently, the monster didn't leave trails behind itself of whatever it was made of. However…

' _There!'_ she finally saw an oddity in the scene—a slightly warped light post. Then she saw more: missing rubbish bins, upside down benches, even small holes on the asphalt of the road. There was a path! She only had to follow it with her own eyes.

And that she did, finding out that it led to a second alley. Almost automatically, Bubbles looked up to see if she could fly over the buildings to move to the other street in this case as well.

Instead, she saw white spheres going straight for her.

"YEOW!" Bubbles let out in surprise as she narrowly avoided them, bolting away. She looked at them as they fell down, and when they reached the ground they unceremoniously collapsed, releasing whatever they hid inside them.

She clearly heard the fizzing sound she had heard before, and it didn't take her long to put two and two together when she saw the holes that they left behind. _'I guess I should avoid those…'_

Then, she looked up and sure enough here it was. The monster was currently grabbing onto a side of the buildings beside the alley, a few stores above her. Bubbles didn't even have the time to say something back that it flung more spheres at her, though perhaps flinging wasn't the best word for it. From Bubbles' point of view, the spheres looked like they literally shot out of its body.

The Powerpuff Girl had yet to be intimated though. Bubbles flew straight for the blob monster, avoiding the spheres as they arrived—they may have been dangerous, but compared to Mojo's latest missile models it was easy to avoid them.

As she got closer, it progressively became harder to keep evading the projectiles, so Bubbles switched tactics.

At one point, from the creature's point of view, Bubbles flew straight into a sphere and said vesicle exploded, releasing the contents around.

What had really happened became clearer as a red beam shot out of the sphere's contents and hit the monster head on. It didn't even manage to release another growl of pain that Bubbles appeared, speeding up for it.

"YAAAH!" Bubbles flew fist into the monster, and her hands connected with the 'skin'.

It was like the monster wasn't even there.

She literally _flew through it._ There was no resistance whatsoever, even if she distinctly felt her hands going through things. Particles she didn't know the nature of hit her face and body as well, making her flinch in disgust, but for the sake of the attack she kept pushing until she connected with the building's wall.

In fact, it wasn't a wall, it was a window, and she crashed into the glass. She immediately felt herself leaving the monster's body, and she came to a skidding halt on the floor of a dark office.

"Oh, ew, ew, ew!" Bubbles couldn't help voicing her distress as she looked at herself and started to pitifully try to cleanse her clothes and skin of the monster's body parts. Something slimy was all over her, but she managed to get out the biggest particles. The colours and forms of the things would probably have been an interesting study, but Bubbles was too much worked up to notice.

Then, she heard the roar, distracting her from the current predicament. Realizing she had forgotten about the monster, she mentally thanked that the floor was an office where no one was inside at that hour, then she flew over to the cracked window—the monster was not there anymore.

When she flew out, she was barely able to catch the monster's crashing down on the road. It had fell down.

That attack must have hurt it more than she imagined. Well, it deserved that! It had tried to eat a skyscraper with people inside!

"I hope you understood your lesson now!" Bubbles shouted at the monster. There were lights appearing all over the street's walls, as people clearly had been woken up by the commotion, and the monster was clearly visible to everyone thanks to the various light posts.

The monster didn't move. Then she heard it. More fizzling sounds. She couldn't see it, but the monster was definitely 'taking nibbles' at the road now!

"Are you just going to keep eating like that?!" Bubbles yelled, half-offended by the monster's lack of attention to her words unless it wanted to attack her. The creature didn't budge, seemingly refusing to answer. It reminded her of Buttercup refusing to acknowledge her while having dinner when she was trying to talk to her. Except that Buttercup didn't plan on hurting people.

She had to make her point clear. Bubbles wasn't looking forward to making another deep dive into the thing's body though, so she prepared to serve another round of heat vision to the creature.

However, she suddenly realized that perhaps that wasn't enough to actually make the creature understand what she wanted. She looked around, trying to come up with an alternative in case there was one, and then she saw it. A billboard, placed on the other side of the road with the shorter buildings.

Without thinking twice (and without thinking about the damage expenses), Bubbles flew up to it and easily pulled it off by sheer strength. Then, she flew right over the feasting monster and let it fall down.

The people on the apartments around looked in amazement from their apartments as the billboard fell towards it, the monsters not even flinching. Eventually, the board crashed down, making a lot of noise and raising a dust cloud, apparently splatting the monster like a bug.

"Serves you right!" Bubbles exclaimed, hovering down to check on it. Already the citizen along the street were cheering for her.

Then, as the dust settled, she saw something moving.

No, the monster wasn't dead. That could've been expected… but what she didn't expect was that it didn't look like it was hurt either.

The billboard was mostly still intact, since what had made a lot of noise and dust were the external parts of it that broke off in the impact. The main body was still intact… it bobbed over the monster's body, as if it was floating over the surface.

Then, Bubbles saw the monster's body move. The 'skin' enlarged around the board's corners, until it was as large as it. Then, it moved upward, encircling it, and before she could realized what was going on, the board had been phagocytised.

Thanks to the monster's slightly transparent skin, Bubbles was still able to look at the image on the board, a simple sale announcement with a big bag of cereals. The image of the box _liquefied_ before her eyes, breaking down into pieces in the span of a few seconds. The board was no more.

And she noticed that the thing's size was different than before. It was bigger now. Not by that much, but still noticeable.

In that moment, Bubbles realized that this was no ordinary Monster Isle monster. There was something about it that irked her, and it wasn't just the general ickness, no.

As the monster roared and flung more spheres at her, Bubbles flew away from the thing, her mind settled on what she needed to do.

' _I have to get Blossom and Buttercup's help!'_

* * *

The hotline rang. However, it had to continuously ring for an entire minute before Blossom finally managed to open her eyes and get up from bed, half asleep and half annoyed.

"Bloss, please destroy that thing or I'll do it myself," Buttercup grumbled in her sleep. Blossom shook her head but nonetheless she hovered quietly to the ringing red phone before her sister could act on her words to answer it.

"Hello?" she said when she got the phone up to her ear. "It's a bit late, Mayor… can't it wait a bit?"

"Hello, Powerpuff Girls?"

That wasn't the Mayor voice.

"Uuh, yeah?"

"This is Directing Chief of the Townsville PD talking. We've met already in the past, you may remember at least the one occurrence when we dealt with a traitor cop, but this ain't the time for presentations and memories, uh… Blossom, right?"

"Yes… what is it, chief?" Blossom wondered. If she thought about it, it made sense that the Mayor wouldn't be on the phone this early in the morning if not downright middle of the night (at least as long as his slumber wasn't disturbed by nightmares and the such), but somebody different from the Mayor calling them was a rare occurrence.

The Professor had made sure to establish a protected encrypted channel to the phone line due to various cases of prank calls for the girls (including instances from their own enemies as well), so only the Mayor and TPD could call them now—yet, it was always the Mayor that still communicated with them basically all the time.

"We have a situation downtown… actually, it's already moving away from the city centre. Ugh! Get your details straight, Perez! Sorry, I mean, we've received reports of a monster wreaking havoc in the city, some kind of blob thing that looks like a giant amoeba or something, I'm not sure, these reports are weird. Anyway, we've dispatched a few patrols to confirm what the heck is going on, but we've called you because I'm reading that, apparently, one of you is fighting it by herself."

"Wait, what?!" One of them? Buttercup had just told her to answer the phone, so that left off…

"The reports from the emergency phone lines mention Bubbles, though I won't take that info for granted. In any case, she seems to be having a hard time holding it off, Blossom, so we thought I'd better to warn you in case you were still at home. You think you can join back with her and deal with the monster before it can cause any more chaos?"

Blossom had missed half of the Chief's words. She had immediately looked at her bed, and sure enough—Bubbles' side was empty.

"W-we'll deal with it, chief, thank you," Blossom said, closing the call. By now, Buttercup was sitting on the bed, looking at Blossom with a half-annoyed, half-sleepy look.

"I swear, whoever thought it was a good idea to attack the city in the night… I'm gonna—!"

"Bubbles is missing, Buttercup!" Blossom interrupted. She was already surfing through their wardrobe and she snatched a dress for herself before throwing a green-coloured one at a stunned Buttercup. "I don't know why, but she left home and went to fight a monster by herself!"

"W-wha? Why would she even—?"

"I don't know, but we'll ask her once we get there. Now we gotta go!" Blossom was already dressing up at surprising speed, with Buttercup managing to shake herself awake after the news and doing the same.

As they finally finished to get ready, a blue streak suddenly bolted into the room through the windows.

"G-girls!" Bubbles uttered once she realized her sisters were already up.

"Bubbles! Where have you been!?" Blossom chastised. "What were you even thinking, going out in the night alone?"

"I-I… we'll talk about it later, it's coming!"

"Who's coming?" Buttercup questioned.

The reply came when they heard a low growl coming from outside. When Buttercup and Blossom flew up to the windows, they saw in the distance the approaching form of the blob monster that had attacked Bubbles, moving over an house in the distance.

"That must be the monster that the Chief told us about," Blossom stated. "All right, we'll deal with it girls. Still, Bubbles, you'll have some explaining to do after we're done!"

Blossom kicked herself into flight, only to be stopped by Bubbles caught her by her leg. "Blossom, wait!"

"What?!"

"We need to get the Professor out of here before we fight it!"

"…why? We're just gonna beat that blob to a pulp before it can even touch our home," Buttercup replied.

"No, you don't understand, I already fought it and it… it's too dangerous for the Professor! I'd rather see him somewhere away from that thing!"

Buttercup scoffed, while Blossom eyed the approaching monster, which was surprisingly fast given how closer it had gotten in the last few seconds.

"Okay, okay. Bubbles, fetch the Professor and get him in a safe place. We'll deal with the blob monster in the meantime."

"Thank you," Bubbles nodded before darting through the door and towards the Professor's room.

"Why even letting her do it, Bloss?" Buttercup said. "Monsters are usually concerned with fighting us more than causing damage."

"I don't know… Bubbles sounded really concerned, Buttercup," Blossom replied as they flew out of the room, facing the unicellular beast. "I guess it's better safe than sorry."

"Suit yourself then," Buttercup shrugged. "I call dibs on the final hit, though."

Blossom sighed. "We _are_ going to stick to a plan, Buttercup. You can have the final hit, but don't just randomly charge until I say so, understand?"

Buttercup shook her head. "All right, all right."

They floated outside and over the road of the neighbourhood as they watched the monster going throughout the houses, either passing over them or in-between, at surprising speed.

"Okay, let's see what this one got. Eyebeams!"

Blossom's and Buttercup's eyes flared up and eyebeam blasts shot out of them, going right into the monster. They hit it square centre, causing the beast to growl in pain, but it didn't slow down. In fact, suddenly it leaped in the air, skipping two house lines and an entire road while heading straight for the girls.

"Oh, so this one can jump at least!" Buttercup exclaimed. She punched her own hand in excitement. "Maybe this is gonna be worth losing an hour of sleep after all!"

"…stay where you are," Blossom said with her eyes narrowed. "We're going to let it come at us and counter-attack as soon as he's over us."

Buttercup glared at Blossom for a second. "Oh, come on! Can't we just charge at it while it's still in the air?"

But Blossom's serious frown didn't leave space for discussion, so she eventually concluded that she may as well respect her order for the time being. "Ugh, all right."

The two remained focused on the incoming monster even when they heard the Professor's screech coming from the house. On the side of the house, the Professor's room's window shattered into a million pieces as Bubbles flew out of it with haste, carrying a still partially asleep but definitely extremely frightened Professor Utonium, still in his pyjamas.

"WHAT THE HECK, BUBBLES!?"

"Sorry, Professor, it's for your own good!"

"What do you mean—woooah!" As Bubbles flew up high in the sky, she saw the falling monster closing on Blossom and Buttercup.

The two Powerpuffs got ready to punch the beast back, but as soon as the thing reached them, their hands hit nothing. In fact, what happened was that the monster moulded its own body, creating tunnels inside itself in the exact points where the girls were.

"Wait, what!?" Buttercup shouted. She tried punching the sticky walls around her, but they moved, avoiding her own punches. "You've got to be kidding me!"

In the span of three seconds, the monster had gone right through them, and landed on the road. It roared, then proceeded to ram into the Utonium household.

"Come back HERE!" Buttercup shouted, flying up to it, but the beast ignored her, its body turning as it saw something that caught its interest and started to move in their direction.

Blossom, equally as surprised as her sister, but more cautious of the blob's behaviour, noticed its change of target, and following it she realized that it wanted to go after Bubbles and the Professor. _'It's still chasing her down…?'_

Her thought got the confirmation it needed when the monster slow crawl turned into a fast skid in the direction of Bubbles, who was still flying in search of a place where to leave the Professor.

Yet, its determination wasn't enough to ignore constant attacks, and Buttercup proved to be an annoyance it couldn't ignore as she shot another eyebeam blast at it, scorching the 'skin'. The monster growled and slowed down, and Buttercup took that as her cue to charge in. "You and I are not done yet!"

As soon as her punch reached the monster's membrane, though, she suddenly felt like her decision wasn't the best, as she didn't actually feel a hardened skill layer crumble behind her punch. Her entire hand went through the membrane like she was cutting through swiss cheese, and the entity of the damage ended there.

"Huh?!" confused, Buttercup didn't react immediately, so she didn't see the pseudopodium sprouting out of the creature's body nearby, then bolting at her. It rammed into her full force, and this time it felt like she had been punched by a proper Monster Isle monster full force as she got thrown away and down the road, where she slammed on the asphalt.

Buttercup gritted her teeth as she started to stand back up, but rather than just waiting for her to get back into the fight, the creature roared at her and slimed right on her.

"BUTTERCUP!" Blossom was ready to bolt towards the creature head on to help her sister, but her worry proved unneeded as Buttercup literally exploded out of the creature. Something slimy went behind her as she flew, but she seemed otherwise unharmed.

Surprisingly, Buttercup didn't press the attack, preferring to fall back with her sister. "Are you all right?"

"Just a little bit dirtier than usual, not that it bothers me…" Buttercup replied, trying to clean off organic particles she had no idea of the true nature, and didn't want to know either. "That thing somehow can either harden the… skin of it at will, else it's basically a giant jellyfish Blossom."

Blossom nodded as the monster slimed towards them, emitting another low growl. Now that they were able to stare it down, both of the puffs had understood that this monster was actually pretty small, just a bit bigger than a house—nothing comparable to the hulking beasts they were used to. They just had to pay attention to any unwanted surprises, and it would be an easy enough job.

"Very well, let's get this over with. We take it from the sides, Buttercup, and wear it down while we wait for Bubbles. Got it?"

"Roger, red!"

Thus, the two Powerpuff Girls sprang into action, starting to pelt the monsters with eyebeam shots from opposite directions.

In the meantime, the Professor had finally ended his flight on a nearby house roof, as Bubbles put him down. The Professor had somehow forgot already about his rude awakening at the hands of Bubbles and subsequent flight, as he had only eyes for the creature the Powerpuffs were fighting.

"Fascinating… I've never seen something like that, and yet it is so reminiscent of…" he said to himself, a hand on his chin. He managed to capture the 'science mode' look even with the least appropriate of clothes he currently had.

"Stay here, Professor!" Bubbles said quickly. "I've gotta help Blossom and Buttercup!"

"Wait, Bubbles! I think I know how that creature works. I may be able to think up of a way or two to defeat it quickly!"

"No time, Professor!" Bubbles was already hovering towards the battle. "I know it's dangerous, but it is not invincible, I know that. It'll be dealt with before you know it!"

Then, she dashed away towards the monster. Her sisters had been keeping up the barrage non-stop and the blob monster looked quite in distress. It emitted roars and tried to shoot more of the white spheres that it had used against Bubbles previously, but it threw them in random directions, apparently disoriented by the two-way attack.

Fact was that the spheres were landing around the neighbourhood! They could end up hitting homes and even people!

Bubbles decided that they needed to put an end to this story right there and now. She flew right towards the enemy rather than attempting to join the barrage with her sisters, but still charged up her eyes. She didn't cry out as well to signal them, since she didn't want to warn the monster while it was stunned; she simply kept her speed up until she was too close for the creature to avoid. No use keeping her mouth shut after that point.

"TAKE THIS!"

Blossom and Buttercup watched as they stopped firing moments before Bubbles connected with the monster. As expected, she went right through it once again, but this time Bubbles threw punches and kicks around herself. She kept her eyes closed since she was still disgusted and wanted to at least keep the slime of the monster's internals out of her eyes, but she still felt the particles on her hands and feet, crumbling under her hits.

Then, she fired the eyebeam blast upwards. Buttercup let out a cry of amazement as the red beam suddenly burst out of the monster and ran high towards the night sky. It did much more damage from the inside than any of her or Blossom's attacks had managed before, creating a large hole in the membrane and dispersing body particles all around it.

Bubbles finally left on the opposite side from which she entered, then she flew upwards while cleaning herself off the best she could. Blossom and Buttercup quickly rushed to join her.

"Way to go, Bubbles! That was a good way to finish it off!" Buttercup complimented for once.

"I knew it was vulnerable from the inside… I just guessed really, eh," Bubbles smiled, though she grimaced as she attempted to tear a sticky particle the size of an apple out of her dress. "It's still slimy and icky, though."

"It's not over yet, girls."

Blossom pointed at the monster and sure enough, here it was, moving still, though it wasn't having the best time of its life clearly. It still emitted noises but those were close to laments right now. The injury had already been closed out, the only clue about the recent events being the remains of the creature's internals around it.

Then, the fizzling noise started again.

Blossom and Buttercup didn't react, but Bubbles knew what was going on. "Oh, no! Girls, we have to stop it!"

"What?" Buttercup and Blossom said together, but before they could argue further, suddenly the monster fell into a depression on the road.

"It's getting away!" Buttercup shouted. "The coward!"

The three flew up to the black hole that had been created. Already the monster was no more visible in the darkness—it was still very early in the morning, so the darkness didn't help.

"We have to chase it down!" Buttercup, all the ever unrelenting, stated.

"No, wait… maybe it has had enough." Blossom suggested.

"No, Blossom! We have to go and finish it off!"

Bubbles brought a hand to her mouth. Her sisters looked at her in surprise.

"Bubbles… are you all right?" Blossom raised an eyebrow.

"Yes, I just… Blossom, I saw what that monster can do. It can eat things, everything, and use it to grow. I threw a billboard at it and it literally grew a few feet in size under my own eyes. It was trying to eat a skyscraper when I first found it… I-I'm worried that may not stop there."

Blossom looked at the hole. They could now no more hear the fizzling noise—the thing was fast when it wanted to dig rather than just absorb, that was for sure.

"We can't chase it down in there. It's basically asking for an ambush," Blossom stated. "This monster is easy to tell from the rest, in any case… if it shows up again today, we'll know."

"Aww, come on…" Buttercup protested. "It might not even get back for a second round at all."

"I would be better if it actually left us and the city alone, really… but this thing… I'm not sure, I'm not convinced it is from Monster Isle. It's too small for a monster like the ones from there," Blossom said, giving another glance to the hole.

"Maybe it's young? Goin' back crying for mommy I'm sure…" Buttercup grumbled.

"Young monsters don't attack the city, Buttercup," Blossom stated, "And even if it was, it could've tried to actually get away from the city and leave for the island in the sea, not dig down to get away from us. No, this must be something else."

"I… I just hope it can't grow that big beyond how big it is right now…" Bubbles said.

"Girls!" a shout came from the distance. The Professor waved his hands in the air in an attempt to get their attention. "Any help here?!"

"We'll leave things be for now, but not let your guard down, okay?" Blossom concluded. She gave a look to Bubbles. "We're getting to the bottom of this."

Bubbles nodded, her smile returning as she thought that now, together, they could easily deal with the monster and solve everything before the end of the now beginning day. The girls quickly flew up to the Professor and grabbed him while returning to their house. The girls' home had endured some damage as there were some cracks on it on the front, where the monster had slammed itself into, and basically every window on that side was shattered as well.

"You even knew that thing was going to ignore us at first and go for the house…" Buttercup told Bubbles. "You tried fighting it by yourself, you said?"

"Uh, yes… I thought it wasn't that big of a problem at first. It was small compared to other monsters after all…" Bubbles explained. "I knew it was very stubborn from the way it ignored me when I first caught it attacking the city."

"What were you thinking, Bubbles?!" Blossom suddenly intervened. "If you saw something like this you should've gone to get us right then and there! And you still didn't tell us what were you doing out on your own in the first place!"

"It was eating a skyscraper, Blossom! The building was already tilting by the time I was there and people were screaming for help, I couldn't just not do anything!"

"You could've distracted it, then guide it to us _first,_ rather than just trying to fight it on your own," Blossom retorted. "Bubbles, you should've known better."

"I thought I could handle it! You girls also fought on your own already, we all did!"

"It was an unnecessary risk!"

"Girls, girls, please, I don't think it's the time to raise your tone now, isn't it?" the Professor chided in. Blossom and Bubbles both scoffed, but kept their mouths shut as they scended on the front lawn and let him go there.

"Now…" he said, still in his pyjamas but still managing a solemn look. "That creature that attacked you… I believe it is a fascinating specimen, we rarely saw monsters like that in the past. Has any of you, actually?"

"I don't think we ever did, Professor… the Monster Isle guys are also far more willing to listen us out, sometimes," Bubbles said.

"And they are more up to a fight and only raise the white flag at the very end of it," Buttercup added.

"They can often be as deadly and cruel to the townspeople though…" Blossom argued. Bubbles and Buttercup stayed silent, not wanting to agree out-loud but recognizing that their sister had a point.

"Well… what if I told you that our mysterious 'blob monster' here doesn't even have a brain to actually be reasonable, or accept a fight challenge?"

The girls looked at him in confusion.

"Of course, it doesn't have a brain, it's some kind of blob monster!" Buttercup said. "It's not like gas monsters or mud monsters have a brain, either!"

"Yes, yes, but what I wanted to actually reference," the Professor quickly save himself as he realized he'd just stated the obvious—he sometimes forgot that the girls knew more than most kindergarteners, "is that what we're seeing here is a monster that may be replicating, at a scale orders of magnitude larger than the natural one, the structure of cells."

"Cells… you mean, what you and me and everyone is made of?" Bubbles mentioned.

"Precisely. The 'skin' is a membrane rather than actual skin, and it isn't all that protective as you saw yourself."

"Yes, but it can still pack a punch Professor," Buttercup massaged the back of her head as if to prove her point.

"Did it? Hmm… the fact that the monster exists is already a marvel on its own, so I wouldn't exclude more oddities and surprises from our mutual friend here," the Professor said. "Good grief, what I wouldn't give to be able to capture it and study it! The possible breakthroughs of a close enough replica of the cell structure at this size may be amazing!"

"Let's talk about that after we defeat it, okay?" Blossom said. "And after we find it…"

"Yeah, that thing could be everywhere right now. Where are we even going to find a giant amoeba-whatever thing like it?"

The girls looked at her, then they looked at the Professor, who let out a 'wow' of surprise.

"Oh, no. No, no, no, you can't be serious!" Buttercup reached the same conclusion. "It can't be them!"

"It may not be them… but it may have been _caused_ by them, Buttercup. It wouldn't be the first time they manage to actually succeed in crime without actually realizing it," Blossom said.

"But they're in jail right now, aren't they? They're still in for what they did when they stole all oranges in Townsville…" Bubbles sounded almost as much unconvinced as Buttercup.

"They were there _last we heard,"_ Blossom specified. "It's our first lead, but we may as well follow it girls. We'll pay a visit to the Amoeba Boys!"

"Oh brother…" Buttercup rolled her eyes. "What a bummer if it's really them…"

The Professor nodded. "I'll get back inside, girls. See if I can find out anything on my own and checking on the damage the monster… and Bubbles caused," he eyed briefly the blonde girl, who tried to smile her way out. The Professor wasn't swayed, but he let it go in the name of the biggest issue at hand.

"Good luck girls with your search… and be careful!"

"We'll be, Professor!"


	3. Extracellular Matrix Interactions

"Bubbles, what were you up to this night?"

Bubbles mentally wondered why invisibility wasn't in their repertoire of superpowers. It would've been useful right now…

She sincerely hoped that Blossom would've left this matter be for the time being, but she had underestimated her sister's stubbornness. Couldn't that policeman be any faster? This is the Amoeba Boys they were talking about! Shouldn't he know if a trio of man-sized amoebas were gone from the prison?

"Blossom…" Bubbles started. "It's not… I wasn't up to anything strange or harmful or anything like that! I was doing, uh, a night shift! Like the ones we did in the past, you remember those, right?"

"The ones we did _together…"_ Blossom specified. She narrowed her eyes at Bubbles, who cowered under her gaze. "Why did you decide to just leave, by yourself, and without even so much as a note or something?"

"I j-just… I've been having trouble sleeping lately…"

"How is that related in any way to—"

"I mean it!" Bubbles interrupted. "It's been like this for a while, so I thought I could do… stuff, instead of lying down doing nothing!"

Blossom opened her mouth to reply, then closed it, groaning.

"Bubbles, listen…" Buttercup finally intervened. "We're just worried. We never saw you as the type who enjoyed looking for crime itself—let alone doing that on your own _and_ at night… that's closer to something on my league, if you get what I mean," she chuckled at her own remark. "You gotta admit it's weird leaving out like that when we were asleep, and I don't buy you doing it because you just weren't able to sleep. It can't be just that…"

Blossom got down from the seat and walked away from the two of them, still grumbling under her breath, though she didn't interrupt Buttercup either.

"I-I did have some trouble sleeping. It started a few months ago, though," Bubbles admitted. "I… I wasn't sleeping well because I was concerned about the city at night. We fight crime all the time during the day, but at night… we're unaware of what's going on out there. So, since I didn't know how to get some sleep and peace from those thoughts, I resolved that doing a quick shift in the night to show myself I was just overthinking wouldn't have hurt."

Buttercup looked at her in bewilderment.

"Y-you chose to do that even if you were alone?" Blossom had listened to the entire thing, and her voice was incredulous.

Bubbles nodded vehemently. "I was never going to fight crime alone, though. If there was ever going to be an issue too big to handle on my own, I would immediately go ask for your help. As I did today!"

"But Mojo and the others—"

"No one knew about this, Blossom," Bubbles added. "It was literally just me and a few night shift policemen in the middle of the night that sometimes saw me flying around. It was safe!"

"I…" Blossom let out a sigh. "Bubbles, listen, I just… why did you never tell us at least?"

"I didn't want to worry you two as well, or even the Professor," she said, her voice becoming a bit lower as her turned her eyes to the floor. "I felt like it was an issue I had to deal with on my own. It also became a bit of a habit, when those thoughts stopped bothering me as much as they did early on… it always worked out well, in the end."

"You can say that again. That oversized amoeba out there would've done a lot of damage if it weren't for you finding it early on," Buttercup conceded.

"Still, Bubbles, I… look, I understand now, but you should've told me and Buttercup at least, so that we were at least aware of what you could be doing. We had no idea where you were earlier! You said you looked out for trouble, but sometimes trouble comes for you whether you want it or not… and that monster out there proves that."

"Yeah, Bubs, I agree with red here," Buttercup said. "I didn't even believe you were out there at first, until you went through the window. If we were knew, we could at least have known where to start looking somewhat."

"I guess…" Bubbles pulled her knees up and hugged them. "I didn't think about it that much…"

"Hey, it's okay. Just be a bit more talkative all right? It looks like you've been having some worries of your own. We can help with that!" Buttercup proposed.

"And you promise not making fun of me?"

"Only if that doesn't help in making you tough," Buttercup smiled.

Bubbles glared at her.

"Oh, all right, all right, no jokes it is."

"And please, Bubbles… tell us, in the future. It's important. For all of us," Blossom said.

Bubbles nodded. Before she could reply further, though, the three were called by a nearby officer. "Powerpuff Girls?"

The girls turned to see another man, but not the same one who had welcomed them into the prison lobby in the first place, and that was supposed to go back for them once he found out about the Amoeba Boys.

"Yes?" Blossom greeted.

"Pardon me for barging into your discussion unannounced, but I am a great fan," the policeman smiled. "I still can't believe the Powerpuff Girls themselves showed up at our prison here. We usually deal with every day's rapscallions, not the big name villains you girls deal with on a daily basis."

"Yeah, tell me about it… we're here because of a trio of dudes who're even lower than the average crook," Buttercup grumbled.

"Is that so… you wouldn't be talking about the Amoeba Boys now, would you?"

The girls exchanged a fast glance. "Do you know them? Are they here?"

"Of course I do! Every guard working in strict contact with the inmates knew about them, you don't see a man-sized amoeba every day after all. Besides, they were downright hilarious! Too bad they ended up being so nice and fun they got a free release on parole…"

Well, at least that meant the girls didn't have to wait for the lobby officer to come back from his visit to the archives. Even if the news weren't promising.

"So… they aren't here anymore?" Blossom scratched her chin. "We had a hunch about them and… do you have any idea where they may have ended up?"

"Beats me," the man shrugged. "Their boss was pretty mad, which is weird for criminals right after release—but to be honest, those weren't normal criminals to begin with. Now… would you mind if a snatch a trio of signatures from you three?"

* * *

The girls flew out of the prison with empty hands. "That… was a waste of time," Buttercup grumbled.

"Actually, I don't think so…" Blossom mused. "If the Amoeba Boys are out of prison, that would actually mean they'd be free to have, uh… whatever role they may have concerning the amoeba-ish monster that attacked Bubbles."

"Well, that applies to any other enemy of us in Townsville! I think it's more likely that Mojo went on experimenting with something that went awry, or Princess paying for some secret laboratory project that resulted in that thing, or I don't know… anyone else!"

"If that's the case though… the Boys could still be involved… just without being aware of it. It wouldn't be the first time that happens…" Bubbles replied. Buttercup groaned.

"All right, let's say they're involved. What does that give us? Does that change anything, about a monster being on the loose right now?"

"No…" Bubbles conceded.

"Yeah, that's true…" Blossom agreed. "Perhaps the Professor could get something useful out of it, he's studied the Amoeba Boys in the past, when we used them to get the cure for the Amoeba Flu. But other than that… we still got that monster to deal with."

She raised a hand and the Powerpuff Girls stopped in mid-air. "Let's split up and search the city. I'll go north—you take the south-west Buttercup, while Bubbles goes south-east."

"All right, works for me. Me and Mr. Blob Monster have a score to settle…" Buttercup finally allowed herself to don an eager grin.

"Yes, but do _not_ try to fight it on your own!" Blossom gave a scolding glance to Buttercup, before her eyes shifted with a meaningful glare to Bubbles, who cowered. "For you both. Shout for the other two if you see it. As long as we're together, we should be able to pin it down and finish it off!"

* * *

The armchair made a creaking _'click'_ as Him extended the recliner and he stretched himself over it. He reached out with an arm over to his side and picked up with a claw the smoothie that he had ready. After slurping up a sip, he returned to watching the feed in his lair—more specifically, the two feeds.

One feed actually divided itself into three different video feeds as the Powerpuff Girls split up. Him grinned.

"This is proving to be far more entertaining than anticipated!" he excitedly commented to himself. "The Powerpuff Girls are really going all in from the very beginning. All the better…"

He glanced at what the other feed was showing, and his grin grew eviler and wider. "As you still don't know what truly is awaiting you, girls… this is indeed something that will provide plenty of amusement. Haha… haha. Hahaha!"

* * *

Almost an hour of scouring around the city centre… and still nothing! As much as she was looking forward to the encounter, Buttercup's patience had long since run thin.

"Ahh! Where are you?!" she shouted to no one in particular. Not surprisingly, there was no reply… but there were also no glances from the people who happened to be walking down the street, doing their early morning routines as if there was nothing unusual happening.

By now, the news of the night attack from the monster had circulated around the city. There was no panic, as most of the time townspeople were very much confident in the girls' ability to scare off any monster attacks—which technically already happened that night, when the girls were able to send the blob monster retreating. Blossom had mentioned possibly paying a visit to the Mayor to discuss an evacuation, but neither her or Buttercup were sure about the true danger the giant amoeba constituted. Only Bubbles was still worried about it.

By now, Buttercup was more bored than worried. She kicked herself into flight again, moving down the street for another town district.

She was really starting to consider just calling up for her sisters to regroup and call it for the day, when she heard a dull noise. It took her a few moments to recognize it: the fizzling! The noise of the thing eating! It had to be close.

The only problem was… it was way, _way louder this time._

"What the…" Buttercup was agape when she saw an entire section of the road collapse into nothingness. People screamed as they got away—no one was in the demolished section thankfully—and tried to save their lives, escaping from whatever monstrosity was causing the destruction.

In truth, not even Buttercup was prepared when she saw the first pseudopodium come out of the abyss. Because after that, the body started to flow out. Then more pseudopodium shot out, crashing into the buildings and pulling more of itself out. In the span of seconds, it was already as big as it was during their fight an hour and a half earlier.

But it didn't stop there.

The thing just… kept coming out. Soon it covered the entire hole it had come from, and after that it covered the entire street. It grew more and more, getting bigger until Buttercup, despite hovering high up in the street and at the same height of the eight store of the nearby buildings, couldn't see beyond the body of the monster.

"GUYS!" she shouted as loud as she could while dozens of white spheres were shot at her from the monster's body. "Guys, he's here and he's _mad!"_

The spheres this time were not just many more than before—they were larger and travelled faster in the air, proving to be a much more dangerous attack for Buttercup to try and dodge. Not that she wanted to stick around any longer, as she immediately shot upwards once she got a window to do so.

The giant monster emitted a guttural, incredibly loud growl, and threw out pseudopodia in an attempt to grab her, but Buttercup was faster and flew higher in the air. She could already see the blue and pink streaks above the skyscrapers in the distance heading for the monster, but she couldn't stay put as the thing kept shooting white spheres at her faster than an attack helicopter gatling gun. And she knew how fast those shot.

Gritting her teeth, Buttercup tried to retaliate with eyebeams, and soon after that Bubbles and Blossom joined the bombardment, shooting at the giant creature that kept getting larger and larger. Unfortunately, their attack had no clear effect if not for annoying it further.

"Freaking Amoeba Boys, if it's you inside that thing, I will make sure to beat you back to the big bang or whatever, you hear me!?" Buttercup shouted, having had it with the continuous dodging. But before she could charge head on, there was a pink streak that came in front of her.

"Halt it, Buttercup! You aren't going against that thing alone!"

Buttercup frowned. "In case you haven't noticed, Bloss, that thing is now a dozen times bigger than it was when we fought it two hours ago! We must destroy it now, or it will keep getting bigger!"

Blossom simply glared at her. "We don't have time to argue, Buttercup. It will overwhelm us if we attack independently. We must think of a plan first, then we—"

"Girls, watch out!"

A pseudopodium fell on them, an incredibly thin filament of cell membrane this time which was covered by unidentified shapes that none of the girls were able to recognize. Blossom and Buttercup weren't enough fast to dodge it, as the thing travelled much faster than the 'shock' pseudopodia used by the blob monster earlier.

As soon as the membrane connected with them, all the weird-shaped objects that dotted the membrane appendix suddenly moved, immediately taking hold of the two Powerpuff Girls, covering them and keeping them held down over the membrane.

"Augh! Let me go!" Buttercup cried, trying to pry the things off. But they were incredibly sturdy, and sticky. Blossom didn't have much success in doing the same as well.

The help came in the form of Bubbles, who wasted no time and sliced the pseudopodium off before the creature could make another move, shooting at the base of the extension where she felt like it was weaker, a decision that proved wise.

Blossom and Buttercup ended up falling down with it, as the membrane proteins didn't detach from them as soon as the pseudopodium did, but the monster cared little for it as it turned its enormous body in the direction of the blue puff.

Bubbles didn't cower this time, facing the monster head on as she kept her distance.

"You think that because you're so big, you can do everything you want in Townsville now, you big meanie?!" Bubbles shouted. "This is our city, and it doesn't matter whether you're as big as a house, as tall as a skyscraper, or as large as a district. We'll still beat you down, and we'll make you sorry for it!"

The monster was unperturbed by Bubbles' words. It emitted a loud, ravenous roar, which was clear enough for her to understand that this thing wasn't backing down either.

So be it—she wasn't going to let it go on a rampage under her watch. And neither were her sisters, as Blossom and Buttercup—still trying to get off protein remains off their clothes and skin, re-joined up with her.

"See what I mean, Buttercup?"

"Whatever, red… all right, I'm all ears."

Blossom looked at the monster. "Well… we don't have time to get back to the Professor to check if he's found out anything useful. But he did mention that the membrane wasn't as protective as he expected. Which means… that we can easily get in."

"You want to get inside it…?" Bubbles didn't hide her disgust. "Yuck… I didn't like it when it was smaller…"

"Well, if that thing works like most monsters, we should be able to find whatever makes it work from the inside still. If we attack that, it should be down in no time," Buttercup said.

"Precisely! I'm not looking forward to visit the insides of that thing either, but it's our only option… and I don't know how far it'll go if we let it go unpunished while causing chaos in the city."

She extended an arm. "We'll charge, me first, you two right behind me, wedge formation! Come on girls, let's show this evolution geezer what it means to mess with our city!"

Bubbles and Buttercup nodded, and the girls assumed formation just as the monster started to move towards them. It was fast, much faster that it was in its smaller form, and its body behaved like a perfect fluid, flowing through streets and between the walls of buildings and skyscrapers without so much of a pause. It really looked unstoppable, but the Powerpuff Girls didn't care.

Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup let out a war cry together in defiance of the monstrosity as they crashed through the cell membrane and made their entrance into the cytoplasm.


	4. Cytosol

The cellular membrane of the monster was no match for the girls' strength, as they hoped it to be. Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup cut through it like knives on butter, and soon they found themselves inside the creature.

Blossom, unlike her sisters, tried to hold her breath at first, believing that there may not be any air while they were inside the giant cell. Yet, it didn't take her long to realize that in there, things didn't exactly work like she would've expected.

First of all, she felt like she was immersed into some sort of fluid… to an extent. She felt particles touching and flowing over her skin lightly, as well as streaming over her clothes and, disgustingly enough, through her hair—but she didn't feel any type of pressure on herself, nor did she feel like she was drenched by whatever was around her. In fact, she had to keep flying to hold her position in a hover, since she didn't just naturally float. She could also breathe as well, as weird as that sounded.

The girls came to a stop, and Blossom tentatively checked her surroundings, keeping her eyes narrowed. When she understood that the fluid was not bothering her at all, she fully opened her eyelids and looked around.

The view left her incredulous.

The cytoplasm was a spectacle to be amazed by. Even Bubbles and Buttercup, who had experienced briefly the insides of the monster in its juvenile form, were stunned by the scene, far different now that the monster had grown to its current size.

She was hardly able to focus on anything. She saw dozen, hundreds of spheres not unlike the corrosive ones that the monster had used to attack them up until that point, travelling through the fluid, sometimes following visible trails and columns that ran along the entirety of the cell body. She saw, very far in the distance, a large amount of incredibly complex structures, some similar to the cell membrane, others unlike anything she'd seen in her life. Kindergarten school hadn't been the best in giving her biology notions, even basic, and she was more interested in mechanics and chemistry anyway. Therefore, she had no idea of what she was looking at. And the cytoplasm was dense as well, so much that just forty-fifty meters or so away from her, it was already hard to discern details.

It was… overwhelming.

"Wow… it's… it's kind of beautiful," Bubbles managed to let out. "I didn't know it would be this… clean, and nice, now that we're inside it. It's still… slimy, but…"

"Yeah, this is nowhere like being swallowed by a lizard monster or something like that," Buttercup agreed. "Gee, I don't know even where to start though. Does he even know we're inside him?"

Blossom shook her head, trying to refocus. "The monster has to know. It won't take him much to react, so we better make our move and start doing some damage. Come on! We should—"

She noticed something moving towards them, passing through the cytoskeleton web. At high speed. White spheres!

"LOOK OUT!"

Bubbles and Buttercup flew away in opposite directions, while Blossom flew back. The spheres swarmed the area, jumping off the filaments and columns that were everywhere while aiming for the girls. The spheres were mere projectile when they were outside, but now it looked like they were constantly guided, as if they were seeking them out individually with a will of their own.

Dodging them wasn't enough, and soon the girls started to fire eyebeams at them to scatter them out. As fast as they were, the lysosomes apparently had no self-preservation instincts and the girls made quick work of a lot of them, cutting through them with their eyebeams.

Fact was, there were a lot of them, and soon Blossom understood that they couldn't just fight it out indefinitely.

"Girls!" she shouted, "We gotta move!"

Buttercup flew above Blossom, shooting two eyebeam blasts and cutting through five white vesicles in the process. She flew away immediately from them as their contents didn't just fall down, but rather expanded around the fluid-like thing they were immersed in. None of the girls knew why that happened, but they learned fast to keep in mind the strange behaviour of the world inside the blob monster without questioning it.

"Where to, red?"

"Uh, I don't know, just move! We need to find some place here that's a weak point, so let's go!" Blossom cried out.

She zapped away in a random direction, just in time to avoid a group of white spheres hitting her. Buttercup and Bubbles followed her suit, and the three flew (or swam, they weren't sure how to define it) inside the cytoplasm as they looked for anything that looked vulnerable.

Their search proved hard at first. The structure of the cytoplasm disoriented the girls, and a few times they even found themselves almost crashing into what was in fact the external membrane, forcing them to turn around and resume the search in another direction. The cytoskeleton filaments and vesicles that were everywhere clouded their view in the long distance, and the white spheres that the monster used to defend itself were a constant source of distraction.

' _Where is your Achilles' heel? You got to have one,'_ Blossom thought as she and her sisters kept flying. The corrosive spheres didn't stop coming, as they kept popping up wherever they went.

"Ugh! I'm starting to get fed up with this!" Buttercup yelled, as she shot her eyebeams at a group of spheres above them. "We need something to actually fight this thing back!"

"Wait, girls!" Bubbles cried. "What about that? Right ahead!"

Blossom narrowed her eyes and checked in that direction and noticed a relatively large structure. It was reddish in colour, and it didn't seem to have a distinct shape, but it was recognizable in the chaotic cytoplasm.

Its function though was betrayed by the extreme traffic that swarmed around it. There were more complex structures, somewhat similar to the ones that were now present outside on the monster's 'skin', handling vesicles and large amounts of some unidentified material. Things entered, and things different from those that arrived left. Blossom didn't have the words for whatever was going on, but she saw that work was being done there, and there was a lot of it.

It had to be important… and it was their best bet.

"Okay. Let's aim for the, uh, thing Bubbles saw. That should—"

Their path was blocked by a large sphere. This vesicle was much bigger than any of the white spheres and came up abruptly in front of them, almost as large as a small house. Its colour was also slightly different, the white membrane letting the girls see something blueish inside. The girls scattered in order to avoid it.

"What the—" Buttercup growled, but then she saw that there was something going on inside the large vesicle. She came slightly closer as she kept watching.

The things she was seeing… were those lights?

Lights appeared, and then disappeared just as fast. They almost looked like tiny… explosions. Or lightning.

The vesicle moved abruptly again, and this time it rushed towards Buttercup.

"Out, OUT!" Buttercup yelled out of instinct, flying out of the way. "Stay away from that thing!"

"Wait, w-why!?" Bubbles was above Buttercup, safely out of the vesicle's path.

However, Blossom, flew after the thing rather than keeping her distance. Her eyes brightened up as she charged up a blast.

"Wait, Blossom, hold it!"

"We don't have time for this Buttercup! We must do some damage, we can't keep this up!"

"Blossom, no!"

Blossom shot her eyebeams, and as expected they cut through the vesicle's membrane easily. What wasn't expected was that the contents of it exploded out as soon as the membrane was cut, violently releasing whatever the contents were in the cytosol.

It looked like a storm cloud exploding out of the damaged vesicle, as the girls could clearly see inside it electrical discharges and almost firecracker-like explosions, expanding outwards at fast speed after destroying the remnants of the membrane.

Bubbles and Buttercup were far away enough to be safe and they flew in the opposite direction as soon as they realized they were in danger, but the same wasn't the case for Blossom, who ended up being flooded by the cloud before she could get away.

"BLOSSOM!" Buttercup and Bubbles shouted together as they saw her disappear within the dark cloud.

Bubbles would have gone straight for the cloud, but Buttercup took her arm, holding her in place.

"W-what—!"

"Below, Bubbles, let's go below it! I'll take the right side, you go for the left, but stay out of that thing!" Buttercup interrupted, then left her just as quickly, aiming straight for the lower part of the storm cloud. Bubbles shook her head, but she couldn't even protest as another swarm of white spheres suddenly came for her. She flew in the direction suggested by her sister while chased by the lysosomes.

Buttercup looked carefully as she flew below the storm cloud, but all she saw where more white spheres coming from below, and… chunks of things falling down?

Yes, those were those structural columns and trails that were all around the place, along with other objects she didn't recognize. The cloud was causing some damage apparently… but it was clear it wasn't enough. She had a hunch that the monster had willingly sent the 'storm vesicle' to them, it wanted them to cut through and risk the damage to fend them off.

"Blossom! Blossom!" Buttercup called. She charged up an energy blast on her hand and turned around just in time to see three lysosomes closing on her. A moment later the spheres blew up, releasing their dangerous catalytic agents far from her. "Where are you Bloss—!"

There she was! She was already out of the storm cloud and she was falling down!

Blossom's speed was actually much lower than expected considering gravity, but Buttercup didn't waste time thinking about it or calling her either, bolting straight for her. More homing spheres appeared and she noticed some aiming for Blossom, and she made sure those things would regret their decision—if they could regret to begin with.

As soon as the last element of the swarm had been destroyed, Buttercup flew to Blossom, ready to catch her before she could descend further into the cytoplasm, but something came to block her flight from below. And it wasn't a sphere.

Buttercup was… quite weirded out in fact, when she stopped to face the new 'foe'. In front of her she saw something that looked… vaguely humanoid in shape. At least, if humanoids had just one arm and no head. The thing was made out of various sub-parts that the girl couldn't quite tell apart from the rest, similar to the ones she'd already seen in other objects and structures around and inside this monster… but this one clearly didn't want Buttercup to get to Blossom.

It didn't matter what it was, in the end. Blossom was still falling, and she wasn't moving. She was unconscious, and she needed her help.

"I don't have time for this," Buttercup glared at the humanoid protein construct in front of her and her eyes lighted up.

The construct simply moved to avoid her beam though, rather than just taking it like the vesicles did. "Oh, so you want to play, cell boy!?"

Buttercup rushed at it and raised a punch, ready to end the fight quickly. However, the protein soldier was fast enough to actually evade her fists as well. Buttercup simply got angrier and kept trying to punch it.

"Stop being a coward and fight!" Buttercup growled. She was so exasperated that she didn't notice the protein soldier moving its arm and piercing its own body with it… or actually, wedge it in a hole inside its belly.

Something lighted up, and when the thing took it out, it had a clump of bright material in its 'arm' tip.

"Huh?"

The protein soldier made its move and shoved it on Buttercup, at inhuman speed. It succeeded, taking her aback and smacking the thing on her chest.

"What do you think you're doing, you little—!" Buttercup's rant was interrupted as the material lit up, then exploded, sending her roaming in the air. The soldier stayed motionless for a few seconds, then made a move to move its arm to the slot in its 'stomach' once again.

Before it could proceed, though, an eyebeam came from behind it, slicing it in two cleanly. The two halves of the construct fell down without further reaction, revealing Bubbles, who was holding Blossom on her shoulder.

"Buttercup! Are you all right!?"

"I-I'm fine!" Buttercup managed to recover in mid-air and flew to Bubbles. A part of her dress around her chest had been blown to smithereens, but otherwise she just had a bit of a livid below her chin. "That thing hits hard, but not hard enough to hurt… Let's get away from this cloud!"

The two of them moved away from the zone below the cloud and kept flying, putting some distance between them and the storm cloud. Noticing that there were no white spheres chasing them for now, Buttercup raised a hand. "Hold it, I… I need to breathe for a moment."

When they stopped, they looked at the cloud, which by know was very similar to a large cumulonimbus full of lightning, though she couldn't hear those explosions coming from it anymore.

Buttercup coughed as she tried to recover her breath, since the explosion of the 'bomb' the protein humanoid had used had knocked the wind out of her. Then, she looked at her sisters.

"How's Blossom?" she asked.

Bubbles took Blossom in her arms to check on her and show her sister, and what Buttercup saw was surprising if not downright shocking. Blossom had burns all around her body, with parts of her dress and bow charred and some enough to be entirely missing. However, her face and eye lids had the most serious of all the burns. They looked strange as well… Almost like a very regular spotted motif. Small locks of her air were either burned or missing as well.

Buttercup knew that her sister was hurt, but she wasn't sure how to take the fact that her injury consisted of _burns,_ of all things. The Powerpuff Girls could endure literally both extremes in terms of temperature—even going down a volcano and flying inside its magma chambers was no issue for them, as long as it wasn't for long! Blossom had been inside that the storm cloud for less than half a minute, and it had caused… this?

"…how did this happen?" Bubbles simply said.

"I dunno… but we better make her wake up. Blossom! C'mon Bloss, rise and shine!"

Blossom's eyelids half-opened. "…wha?"

"Good to see you back in the world of the living, now—" Buttercup shot her eyebeams at something behind Bubbles, and Bubbles heard the distinct noise of cell membrane being cut through and subsequent release of digestive material. "Now… we need to get out of here."

"B-but wait, no! We can't! W-we must beat this thing!" Blossom's eyes shot open as she talked.

"B-but Blossom! This thing hurt you! You got some bad burns on your face!" Bubbles protested.

"I don't…" Blossom winched, possibly just realizing that she was in pain.

"We'll talk later about what we should do, Bloss!" Buttercup flew up a little and she looked around. More lysosomes were coming, from all directions. They didn't have much time. "Can you fly on your own?"

"Y-yes," Blossom said as Bubbles carefully let her go. She tried to stabilize herself in a hover, then whirled around. Her body protested with more pain and she groaned, but she forced herself to ignore it. She wanted to see if…

"T-there!" she pointed at the same organelle they'd seen earlier in the distance. "W-we must destroy that thing!"

"Girls, there's another one of those large electric-something spheres! It's coming towards us!" Bubbles shouted in alarm.

"Blossom, come on, we don't have enough time!" Buttercup flew towards the nearest white sphere swarm and started shooting eyebeam blasts at them.

"Wait, j-just listen to m-augh!" Blossom gritted her teeth. She raised a hand before Bubbles could say anything. "L-listen, let's go for it, then destroy it as we get away once we're far enough. That m-must be something important, if it is and we take it down, it should at least s-slow him down."

Buttercup sighed as she turned around. "Okay, okay, lead the way, but be fast!"

Blossom nodded, then zapped away. She found she was still able to keep up a fast flight, though the cytosol touching her burned skin marks was proving to be painful. Yet, she ignored it, wanting to get this over with first.

"Follow me!"

Buttercup and Bubbles acted like fighters in a squadron protecting the bomber from enemy planes. They flew far from the storm cloud, which by now was depleting its energy and dispersing, while the second peroxisome ended up missing them and moved elsewhere, not following them at all. Blossom led her sisters towards the unknown organelle, then flew above it and then proceeded ahead, avoiding the heavily dense area around it.

As Blossom looked around to check for dangers, she thought she saw something large in the distance—an entity that she hadn't seen before. It was bigger than anything she'd seen up until now and… purple-ish, but from the distance and in the chaos, she could not tell more than that.

She shook her head, thinking back to her current objective. Once they were about twenty meters away, Blossom shouted her order. "Do it!"

"We're too close!"

"Do it! We'll keep flying!"

Buttercup grumbled to herself before nodding. "Oh, all right, at my three we do it Bubbles! One!"

White spheres tried to catch them, but the Powerpuffs were basically surfing through the cytosol like hovercrafts at this point. They were too fast for any of the vesicles that were chasing them.

"Two… and three!"

Bubbles and Buttercup turned their heads and, without slowing down their flight, shot their eyebeam blasts.

Bubbles' lasers ended up piercing through multiple white spheres among the ones that were chasing the girls, and the blast stopped at the last one, causing a detonation. Buttercup's blast however managed to go through the swarm and reach the organelle.

As soon as it was there, the thing exploded.

"Wha—!?" Blossom turned around just in time to feel the shockwave, sending her and her sisters tumbling in the air.

"KEEP GOING!" she shouted when she saw the fireball.

The girls took back control of their trajectories, then resumed to fly away as the mitochondrion caused a chain reaction, creating a ball of yellow light that engulfed everything that was nearby. It stopped actually only moments after appearing, but the girls, not wanting to take their chances, kept rushing for an exit, and as soon as they saw the large wall that was the external 'skin', they aimed straight for it.

Buttercup noticed two more of those humanoid proteins that were going fast over a nearby column, already holding those explosive clumps in their arm tips. "Don't slow down!" she cried out. "Avoid those human-shaped things!"

The protein soldiers flung their explosive bombs at them, but the girls at this point were already experienced in avoiding things. The bombs missed their target and exploded after the girls were already on the cell membrane.

As easily as they entered, the girls left the monster's body by piercing through, and they found themselves way above the lower buildings of Townsville. They kept flying while they heard the amoeba monster letting out an ominous, guttural growl behind them. When Buttercup finally turned around, she saw no trace of the protein soldiers, though she saw the swarm of white spheres being flung out of the monster's body in their direction.

The girls didn't slow down and soon they were out of reach, the spheres inevitably falling down below, blowing up over the buildings and releasing their contents there. Blossom could only hope the people in this area had managed to get out of there already.

The monster hadn't moved, but by now the girls, above in the air, could take in its enormous size. It was large enough to cover an entire city block… and still be way over it in terms of height. It was perhaps not as tall as the tallest of the monsters they had fought in the past, but it was the biggest by a large amount in terms of area covered and sheer volume.

Blossom noticed that there were lights visible through the membrane, right in the area they had left. Perhaps them destroying that weird shape had caused damage… but that thing was so big, did it really matter?

"Holy moly, that thing's bigger than anything living at Monster Isle…" Buttercup said.

Bubbles remained in silence, locked almost in terror in an imaginary staring contest with the amoeba beast, which had not moved yet.

Blossom soon realized they had depleted their options. The insides of the creature were a dangerous location to explore, they just couldn't spare roaming inside the cell body and letting that monster use whatever he had in store for them that hadn't showed up yet. They needed to know what to aim for, a true weak point that they could strike swiftly with one blow.

As she looked at the city below her, and the palaces and offices, she took a decision. "We must drive him out of the city."

"Very well, but how do you think we'll get his attention?" Buttercup said.

"I think… that he knows well we're here. And that he's staring at us…" Bubbles whimpered.

As soon as she finished speaking, the monster started moving abruptly.

It was fast.

"GO!"

* * *

People on the outskirts of Townsville screamed and rushed to either their homes, or as far away as possible form the impending doom. Entire families thought they were done for, when their entire house was submerged by the monster's fluid body, often crushing windows in the process.

It was just by sheer luck that the amoeba wasn't actively trying to absorb within itself the houses, or crush and invade them. Though the catch was that its utter focus was on the retreating trio of girls that it wanted to annihilate.

The Powerpuff Girls had ceased sending eyebeam blasts to the enormous blob by now. They had realized that their blasts weren't just doing anything worth the effort, and their ranged attacks had now been dedicated to shoot down any lysosome sphere that they couldn't avoid, or that could've hit innocents if left alone.

Blossom hissed as another pain burst shot through her. These burns on her body and especially her face were biting to say the least, and it wasn't getting any better…

"So, any ideas?" Buttercup cried out. The monster behind them emitted another guttural, echoing call, and they saw a salvo of white spheres being shot from its body. They looked like artillery shells as they coursed through the sky, first going up them coming down at them.

Bubbles and Buttercup shot down a few of them, though the latter kept talking. "I hope you got something in mind, Bloss!"

"Urr… W-we need to stall it somehow and get the Professor to help us. He must know a way to destroy it."

"But how can we keep that thing busy? There's basically an entire mobile city inside that thing, a tank blast wouldn't even tickle it! That thing we blew up earlier didn't do a thing either!"

"I-I don't know Buttercup, but we must try!" Blossom shouted back. She let out a groan as her facial muscles contracting due to the stress ended up stretching her burned skin. "Ack!"

"Blossom, you… you're not well," Bubbles said.

"I'm fine. I'm just… a bit in pain, but I'll be fine. We need first to deal with that thing…"

" _But really… how do you plan to do it?"_

Only the sight of the ginormous blob still moving kept the girls from halting on their tracks in alarm. They still looked around as they kept flying.

They knew that voice…

" _HIM!"_

"Where a-are you Him?!"

"Show yourself, you coward!"

"Get your sorry butt up here and face us you big crustacean poo-poo head!"

Buttercup was incredulous at Bubbles' words, but before she could comment, a red cloud materialised nearby. Soon, the smirking face of Him appeared, along with the rest of his body. He looked relaxed as he lied on his red cloud, which kept up the pace of the girls.

"I… I should've known y-you were behind is. You are the type to send b-big monsters to do the dirty work for you," Blossom said through gritted teeth as she glared at Him.

"Oh, Blossom, you're pretty much misunderstanding the events transpiring at this very moment."

"You think you're gonna make us believe you don't have a role in this?!" Buttercup was barely holding herself from bolting to the demon and give him a piece of her mind. In the forms of uppercuts to the chin, that is.

"I wouldn't even think of lying… at this very moment." Him chuckled to himself. "You see, your new friend there is acting on its own will, girls. I tried to send it to _end you,_ that is true… but I think it really doesn't care about me that much, sadly enough."

"What difference does that make?" Blossom questioned.

"No one, honestly," Him mused. "As long as it's trying to destroy you, though, I'll be satisfied. If it wasn't for the one who's supposed to be the adorable one among you…"

He glared fiercely at Bubbles, who whoever bore her gaze defiantly.

"I probably would already have been rid of you by now. But no matter… at least you provided me with some amusement. Haha… indeed, the last few hours have been quite an enjoyable show!"

An eyebeam blast went for Him's neck, but he disappeared before it could connect. Buttercup's eyes brightened down. "We don't want to hear your opinion, Him. Let us deal with your monster without bothering us, if that's what you want!"

Him materialized again, on the opposite side compared to his previous position. "But girls," he resumed, "don't you want to know how this peculiar monster came to be? I thought you'd be interested. After all, it's not like you have a plan to take it down… do you?"

"You created this thing, and that's it. Leave us alone while we beat it!" Buttercup retorted.

"No, w-wait…"

"Blossom?" Buttercup's glare turned to her leader, but Blossom was already looking at Him.

"You were the one behind this. But you rarely create monsters out of nothing."

Him smiled. "How smart of you, Blossom. Yes… that was indeed the case. The monster here doesn't come from just anywhere… it came from the Amoeba Boys."

The name managed to completely take the girls aback. As soon as Him had appeared, they had completely forgotten about them, and now the demon was saying they were following the right trail all along.

"Yes… those three primitive, pitiful excuses for criminals… incapable of true evil. It was indeed a surprise, when I discovered that there was a chance that they were inadvertently hiding a secret, deep within their bodies, that no one was aware of."

He grinned. "All I had to do, girls, was lit up the fuse and protect it as it burned, up until the thing went off. And here we are!"

Buttercup shook her head. "It still doesn't matter."

Him let out a chortle. "Stupid little girl. It does! The Amoeba Boys didn't just have a secret power. They hid something that was way, _way_ older than they ever were…"

* * *

_True enough… Earth used to be a boring place. With only randomness and laws of nature as the only driving principles guiding the first living beings, and with nothing like the pain and suffering you could inflict on the inhabitants of today… the miracle of life's birth was a rather tiresome one._

_And yet… what you call with your funny names, the times of your planet billions of years before you came to be… was nowhere as close as what you believe in the theories you've built to try and reconstruct what happened back then._

_Primordial soup? Early protein synthesis? The first steps of life, being limited to a handful of random chemical reactions? And all of it by chance bringing to all the life of today. How quaint… and stupid._

_Life evolved rather fast, girls. And it managed to peak in its first form… when the planet was ruled by beings you were never aware of. Primordial in structure, maybe, but unstoppable in practice. Their size was the one of towns if not cities, they fought constantly for space and resources while everything else was left with the dust, and they called home a version of Earth I would call lovely, and you would call a wasteland… the perfect setting for confrontations between these beautiful creatures. Hmm… delightful._

_It was all theirs, girls. The Devourers were the dominators of the planet, and they were undisputed. It is funny… almost sad, to know that their time ended when something that was, rightly so, nothing compared to them, just an insignificant sparkle… was the cause of their demise, and started to kill them one by one._

_Heh… the illness spread fast and did not stop at any moment, and the Devourers paid the price for their inability to adapt to the new enemy. Eventually, they were eradicated, and they left space for beings far smaller, who had finally the chance to live and inhabit the world the old rulers left behind. The world that used to be theirs._

_However, after my discovery, I understood that no… they did not go completely extinct as I thought. Some of them reverted into long-term dormant forms, eventually collapsing or surrendering to the test of time and elements, or dying to those who found them in their weakest state and took advantage of them._

_But against all odds, one survived. It kept itself under the shadows so well… that eventually, its dormant form managed to adapt greatly to its surroundings… to the point that it took a will of its own. Three wills, if you like._

_And now, those pathetic wills have been removed, and the original, true creature that was really behind it all, has awakened. Growing back to its original size, getting back all of its strength… I realized that it is far more intelligent than the Amoeba Boys ever were._

_Because even without listening to my requests… it understood what I said. It understood that you girls were the biggest threat to its path towards reclamation of the planet that was of its kind._

_The Primeval Devourer is here for you, girls. And it won't stop until you're gone for good._

* * *

The girls flew up in the sky when their reached the city limits. The Devourer kept moving and soon was under them, but the girls kept flying upwards, putting some distance between them and the cell membrane under them.

Him reappeared again, his head resting on his pincers as he smiled evilly. "Do you understand now, Powerpuff Girls?"

Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup kept their glares directed towards the monster below them, which let out another bellow. They knew they didn't have much time before it would try something new to catch them.

Blossom looked at Him. "Yes… and it still doesn't matter."

Him arched an eyebrow. "Does it? And what brings you to be so sure of yourself?"

"We _still_ are going to beat this thing back from wherever, or _whenever_ it came from, Him," Buttercup explained.

"We'll make it sorry for what it did to Townsville, and to us!" Bubbles added. "And we'll show him he can't do whatever he wants until we're here to keep the city safe!"

"And no matter what you tell us, we won't back down from this fight," Blossom concluded. She hissed again the injuries bit her again, but kept her glare up.

Him scratched his chin with a pincer. "Hmm… I supposed you wouldn't just let yourself be ended like that, but that would've been boring anyway. It's enough for me to know that you're aware of what kind of creature you're against… that it was _born to dominate._ And that you have no chance to take it down."

Buttercup scowled. "How about you get back to the hole you came from and leave us alone?!"

Him grinned. "With pleasure. I wouldn't miss this ultimate battle for anything in the world… ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha!"

The red misty cloud enveloped Him, and then it vanished, leaving behind no trace. With Him gone, the girls directed their attention back to the Devourer.

"Blossom…?" Bubbles said.

Blossom sighed, resisting the urge to touch her burned cheek.

"…we need the Professor. Let's go!"


	5. Prophase

The table in the kitchen was covered with biology books and life sciences manuals opened at chapters related to various subjects. An open laptop was also present, its screen displaying the webpage of a literature database. Professor Utonium sat on one of the chairs, right now writing down on a small notebook the nth entry of a long, bulleted list.

The Professor usually thought of himself as an expert in most fields of science, but with the sudden appearance of the peculiar creature that had attacked the girls and the city, he'd come to realize that his skill levels in cytology and biochemistry weren't as good as he'd liked.

It was one thing being able to study real life examples and observe their behaviour. That was how he worked when the Amoeba Boys risked turning all of Townville into an illness-infested city. Another example was learning how the girls' bodies worked, compared to normal children, thanks to Chemical X.

The current issue was something completely new for him. The problem of macroscopic proportions that the Amoeba Boys may have caused was out of his league in terms of knowledge required, and he had had to pick up some of his old textbooks as well as recent manuals to fix the shortcomings he had the best he could. And even then… there was no guarantee that those notions on protist living beings would've been valid for the giant monster.

He probably would've stayed there to surf through the books and the articles searching for more useful information concerning the very specific matter of 'causing cell destruction to protozoan specimen', but he simply did not have the time as the girls came through the window, crashing through of course.

"Girls, come on! We can't fix these windows all the tim—woaa!?" Buttercup grabbed him and lifted him up, without waiting for him to finish his reprimand.

"No time for a lecture, Professor, we're on the run! Sorry!" the girl quickly said. Then, she followed her sisters out of the house and flew up in the air.

The Professor understood why they were on a hurry when he saw the Devourer coming towards them. Specifically, he screamed as soon as he saw its enormous form.

"WHAT THE HECK IS THAT?!"

"It's still the same thing from this night, Professor—just bigger!"

"JUST?! That thing is as big as a hundred whales and then some!"

"WE KNOW!"

Professor Utonium realized that he'd just stated the obvious and decided to keep his mouth shut for now.

The girls flew above the outskirts, and only when he understood that the monster wasn't able to come closer any closer and that the Powerpuff Girls were fast enough to keep him away, he decided to question the puffs further. "All right, then… I understand that you went to pick me up for a reason."

"Yeah, Professor… our problem is that we d-don't know what to d-do… we were hoping you could give us a suggestion on how to a-approach it," Blossom said.

"Well, you're in luck since I've been refreshing my memory about this—wait, Blossom? Are those… you're hurt!"

"It's nothing, Professor, I-I can bear it as long as we're busy with the Devourer."

The Professor opened his mouth to protest, then closed it. He knew his girls often fought to the end no matter how dire or many the injuries they got in battle, so he knew there was no use trying to convince Blossom to back down. The three of them were stronger when they worked together, in any case, so he believed that as long as the three of them stuck beside each other, Bubbles and Buttercup would be able to watch their sister's back.

"Okay... can you think up of any idea to—?" Bubbles started.

"SCATTER!" Buttercup shouted.

Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup darted in three different directions as a swarm of lysosomes fell around them. They evaded most of them and cut through the ones they couldn't with their eyebeams, but Buttercup saw that the Devourer had already sent another series of white spheres at them.

"That thing is not leaving us alone anytime soon, isn't it?!"

"Those… are lysosomes," the Professor, still being carried by Buttercup, commented. He was somewhat fascinated by the scene, as he observed the spheres falling down and their released contents consuming whatever object was unfortunate enough to touch it. "The way it's using them is unlike anything I know though."

"What do you—"

The white spheres came down again, and Buttercup silenced herself as she zig-zagged to try and not getting liquefied by one of them along with her creator.

"I-I don't think we have time for thorough explanations right now, do we?" the Professor said matter-of-factly.

"Right."

"But we need a p-plan now!" Blossom shouted from the distance.

"Listen girls, I think I have an idea, but it'll require some time to explain that to you. However, I also got something else in mind… if it works, it'll keep that thing… the Devourer, as you called it, busy for a while, and it'll give us some time to talk."

"Are you _not_ sure it works?"Buttercup said.

"Without any way to test it, it is just a hypothesis. However, I also think it's worth a shot." He pointed towards the west. "Go to the ocean girls, fly above it and get offshore far enough to force the monster to follow you there."

Blossom nodded and dashed in that direction, followed by Buttercup and then Bubbles. Bubbles flew with her back facing forward, shooting down the lysosomes that were still raining down on them, while Blossom guided the group towards the coastal area of Townsville and the docks.

As another loud, booming roar came from the huge unicellular monster, Bubbles noticed that it had increased its movement speed. It was getting closer now!

"Girls! It's faster now!"

"Keep going! We're almost there!"

True to her word, Blossom led her sisters through one of the city blocks farther from the city centre, and moments later they were in the docks area of the city's coastline.

The Devourer was behind them, its body flowing through the streets as a tsunami and coming out of them like a flood, covering entire office complexes and buildings, but the girls simply kept flying, following the Professor's suggestion and going over the water.

The monster didn't slow down. It started to raise its front as it approached the coast, and as soon as it reached the edge, it went down with its front.

As the Blossom and Buttercup turned around to watch, they thought that the creature was just going to float over the sea and keep chasing them with ease. That thought was disproved when they heard another loud, guttural call being emitted from the Devourer's body. This time though it was very much different in tone, as the monster kept crying out and roaring in the distance, and immediately retreated back to land.

From afar, they could barely tell that the body of the Devourer had been affected somewhat. The membrane pulsed and… there was something coming out of it, in the parts that had touched the sea water. The details weren't clear from afar.

The girls slowed down as soon as they realized the Devourer was not giving chase.

"So… he can't swim?" Buttercup said while doubtfully looking at the monster.

"No, I think that seawater hurt him," Blossom reasoned. "He's roared and went b-back as soon as its body made contact with the waters."

"How did you know Professor?" Bubbles turned to her creator. It was clear that he already had a hunch this would happen earlier.

"The process is called diffusion, girls," the Professor answered. "I won't go in the specifics, as I'm not even sure if it's a case of osmosis or other sub-case of the phenomenon… but just know that it's something that relates to how different seawater and that creatures' body are. Nature tries to even out these differences… and the, uh… Devourer, doesn't like it, because it's not adapted to it—I guess."

"Wait, so we can just take a whole lot of water and destroy that thing by pouring it down on him, just like that?" Buttercup said.

"I don't think it'll be that simple. The monster is simply too big, you'd need a quantity of water equal to its volume at least… and we don't know if it's actually vulnerable to it enough to finish it off. However, as you can see… it'll keep it busy for a while."

The Devourer tried again to go after the girls, and again it retreated as soon as its cellular membrane touched the water surface. Some of the docks that went farther towards the sea had already collapsed under the weight of the Devourer's cell body. The monster moved along the port, getting closer to the city, but still sticking to the coast, trying new positions to go after the girls each time.

It even tried to send another wave of white spheres at them, but they were out of range and they simply fell in the sea, where they immediately disintegrated. Effectively, the girls were safe for the time being.

"Okay, it can't follow us here. But if he goes back in the city and wreak havoc there, he may end up forcing _us_ to go after it…" Bubbles said.

"Which is why we must make use of the time we do have!" the Professor concluded. He looked down towards the water surface, and noticed that there was a small ship in the sea, a fishing vessel most likely.

"Let's get down there, I'd rather walk on my feet while we talk."

The girls flew down to the ship and were surprised to see an old man lying on the ships' floor.

Bubbles flew up to him. "I think… he's passed out."

"Guy must have fainted as soon as the monster showed up in the coast. I don't think he'll mind if we stay here for a while," Buttercup said as she left the Professor go.

"Okay, okay. We're here… Now, P-professor… what can we do?" Blossom regarded the Professor immediately.

"Well… to start things off…" he walked over the deck until he was on the edge, and looked at the Devourer in the distance, which was still busy moving back and forth while trying to traverse the sea.

"Cells, which are the biological units that make up life, are in reality very complex machines, or rather systems. Each cell is composed of various subsystems that, through certain mechanisms and structures, participate in various tasks. The entirety of the cell depends on all of these tasks, so if we take one out, the cell itself will die."

"So, you say that we just have to turn off one of these, and the Devourer will be done for?" Buttercup asked.

"That's likely, yes… the issue is that, at this size, this is easier said than done. I can only theorize how it works from here, but if it is similar to an extent to modern unicellular organisms, you would need to damage a lot of different parts all around the cell to effectively take out one subsystem."

"W-while we were inside," Blossom said, coming closer to the Professor, "we destroyed something that hurt him a little. It looked like there was a lot of things going in and out of this thing… and when we blasted it, it exploded in a big explosion."

"Explosion… that is an energy release, and it's possible you girls may have hit a mitochondrion… or whatever is the correspondent organelle for the Devourer. That is a cell part specialized in containing the chemical reactions needed to produce energy… not all of them, but a key part of the whole system."

"I don't think it did much, though… it only made him madder," Bubbles added.

"That means that this Devourer doesn't have just one or a few of them, which is common in the cells we know, but a lot of them dispersed all around the cell body. You'd need to destroy the vast majority of them to harass the energy system."

"That's n-not possible," Blossom said gloomily. She hissed, then stopped herself from touching her hurt cheeks. She spent a few seconds breathing with a frown and her eyes closed, before she could resume to talk. "W-we were barely able to take one out and make it out alive…"

"I see…" the Professor looked at her with worry, then back at the Devourer. "This is valid for most of its other cell systems. You can target the protein translation process, the one used to create proteins and all the structures they compose—but I already know that if the number of lysosomes the monster is throwing out is any indication, you have no chance of affecting enough ribosomes to do any damage."

He passed a hand over his mouth, taking in a long breath before resuming his speech. "I guess that targeting the vesicle production is not possible either, as the web of cellular membranes is simply too complex to handle it all in one go, from the endoplasmic reticule to the Golgi apparatus. And I could go on."

"I don't think I've understood much, Professor…" Buttercup lamented.

"Let's just say… when we use medicines, or toxic substances produced for example by bacteria make you sick, we're talking about millions of molecules of that helpful, or dangerous substance. They are able to affect cells and their structures because there's enough of them to affect each cell as a whole. You three, on the other hand, are like a group of three, single molecules, trying to damage a full cell made of molecules orders of magnitude more numerous than you."

The girls weren't exactly in good spirits after his explanation. "But… there must be a way. You said you had an idea!" Bubbles said, her voice raising in pitch. This thing couldn't be invincible… Him was just messing with them when he told them so!

"That is true… there is one possibility. Before I go there though… Have you seen something, uh… big, very big, inside the monster? Something like the lysosomes, or the mitochondrion you've seen, but much larger than both?"

"You mean like a very large sphere? While we were inside him, I think he sent something at us like that. It had some weird lights in it and when we tried cutting it, it released something that ended up hurting Blossom…" Bubbles suggested.

The Professor shook his head. He had a few theories about what that specific organelle was, since it was the cause of his daughter's injuries, but this wasn't the right moment for those thoughts.

"No, I don't think it's that one either, Bubbles," he simply rejected the suggestion. He tried to think of a way to relay what he wanted to his kindergarten kids. "Listen, when I say it is big, I mean that it must be _huge_ relatively to everything else, _literally_ everything else in the Devourer's body—or cytoplasm," he explained.

"I don't think we've seen anything like that…" Buttercup muttered.

"Wait… I think I did… see something l-like that, Professor. In the distance, barely, b-but I did see something big. It was purple… I think. I'm not sure. But it was bigger than the thing that hurt me."

The Professor nodded. "I'll try to be brief, girls. Cells are able to live to this day because all of the information that tells them, and in a way us, how the entirety of the molecules and structures that make them up are made, are stored in a specific place in the cell body. They use that information to synthetize—uh, I mean, generate new structures and other, well, stuff that's useful for them. The process is a bit more complicated than how I'm putting it, but that's the gist of it."

"So, is this some sort of brain of the cell?"

"Not quite, Buttercup… but it does act as memory storage, at least in terms of instructions the cell follows to produce proteins. The place where all of this is found, girls, is called the nucleus. And I believe that what Blossom saw was exactly that."

"So… we go in, blow up the nucleus, and then it'll be done?"

"It should be," the Professor said. "However, in normal eukaryote cells—"

"English please!"

"I mean, in cells with a nucleus, there is a whole subsystem dedicated in checking what goes in and goes out of the nucleus. The membrane is a double layered one and the pores that control the movement in and out are complex structures on their own as well. If we translate that into the monster… it means that you may have a hard time attacking it. Punching your way through may not work."

He sighed. "Listen girls, your target is not just the nucleus, but the actual objects inside it that store that information I've told you. That is called 'DNA' in my and your bodies, but I doubt the one in the Devourer will be anything comparable to what the cells known to modern biology have. You'll have to find out on your own what has the same function of the DNA in the Devourer, and how to destroy it."

Blossom looked at the monster. "We go in, find the nucleus, and take out the DNA, and then the monster will be defeated. Okay… I think we got it."

"I'm sorry I can't give you more information, girls… but I'm trying to give you only things that are likely to be true. That thing shouldn't even exist according to current laws of biology… so if those laws don't hold for it, then I can't say if the same applies for everything else."

Blossom nodded, then her injuries pulsed again. She shuddered and hissed, and this time she couldn't help tearing up as she gritted her teeth.

"Are you sure you're all right, Blossom…?" the Professor said.

"I'm f-fine," she managed to blurt out. "Let's t-take Him's plaything down first, then I'll go get some help."

She flew up, and so did her sisters. "The faster we're done with this, the b-better…"

"I'll stay here. Our guest here may need some help," the Professor said, eying the still out-cold fisherman, "and I think it's safer here on the sea in any case."

The Professor looked at the Devourer, which had stopped trying to get offshore. "Stay safe girls and be careful!"

The Powerpuff Girls nodded, then turned around. As the Professor kept observing the creature though, he wondered why it had stopped moving. Perhaps it had realized it couldn't catch the girls right now and was going to turn around to attack Townsville?

No, it was not moving. What things could a giant unicellular being like that do that—

…

Oh, no.

"Girls, wait!"

The girls stopped about fifty meters away from the boat when they heard him calling them. They retreated back to the fishing boat with interrogative gazes.

"Professor…?"

"Holy… that is a problem, a big, big problem!" the Professor said in alarm as he kept observing the now immobile monster. "Girls, this may be your biggest chance, but it's also incredibly important that you are fast and find the DNA now. The monster may have entered prophase!"

The girls glanced at each other.

"Woops, sorry. All right, trying to be as simple as possible again… a key subsystem of cells is their ability to duplicate to reproduce themselves. There are a multitude of functions for it, but simplifying it, in multi-cellular living beings it's there for things like growth of the entire organism. In this case though… it may have the primary function of—"

"Are you saying that thing is gonna split in two!?" Buttercup interrupted, unable to contain herself as she put two and two together.

"There are gonna be two of them…?!" Bubbles cried out.

"No, w-we can't let that happen!" Blossom affirmed.

"Yes, girls. The monster may not be actively seeking out to attack Townsville, for the sake of it or to lure you out, because it's now focusing on the system in place to duplicate itself. You need to be fast and act before it's able to create another nucleus and split!"

"Okay, Professor!" the girls turned around.

"Remember girls!" the Professor kept talking, "This is also likely the moment where the DNA is more susceptible to your powers, because it'll be condensed in one place inside the nucleus, rather than being all around it. Prophase is the first phase of the duplication process, mitosis, and it's there that you will be able to strike harder!"

"Got it Professor! L-let's go!"

The girls zapped towards the creature, leaving the Professor alone (as long as the fisherman remained in dreamland, that is). He looked with worry at them as they approached the Devourer, which kept being immobile, basically a hill from the distance that hid from view an entire section of the city except for the skyline in the distance.

Things were happening so fast, he barely could digest what was going on. He would've liked to instruct them further, to study other possible weakness of the Devourer before sending her daughters in such a dangerous mission, but time was of the essence here. The fact Him was apparently involved didn't make things better, either… but there was simply no time to do all of that, not if the creature was really going through mitosis.

He told them all he could tell them. Now it was up to the girls to put those few notions into practice.

' _Girls… please stay safe.'_

* * *

The Powerpuff Girls came to a halt about five hundred meters away from the coast and the port. The Devourer was still not moving—as far as a giant being with a fluid body could stay immobile at least.

Blossom noticed that the skin of the monster's was pulsing farther down its body, somewhere roughly mid-way through. That told her that the Devourer was indeed doing something and wasn't just waiting for them… and if the Professor had had the correct hunch, it meant that she and her sisters had to be really fast.

"Okay, g-girls…" Blossom shook her head, trying to ignore the stinging pain that her facials burns kept sending to her head. The burns on her arms and the ones that got through her dress were starting to bite as well, making it harder and harder to focus.

"You heard the Professor. We need to f-find the core, get inside and take out the DNA. That's a-all we have to do, so once we're in, keep moving and don't engage with anything until we've reached the n-nucleus."

"All right… what do we do once we find it?" Buttercup asked.

"We'll… think about it once we're there. It's no use planning what to do if we don't know f-first what we are up against. And we d-don't have much time for planning, either…"

"Listen, Blossom…" Buttercup hovered closer to her. "Your face… I think it's getting worse. You don't have to—"

She looked at Buttercup with a glare before shouting at her, cutting her sentece off. "Buttercup, I know! It's… it's hard t-to ignore it, it's getting worse. But we must do this together, any of us alone may g-get overwhelmed inside that thing!"

"We're not alone, though. It's me and Buttercup!" Bubbles replied. "It's better than being alone."

"Yeah, and it's a simple job given what the Professor said. We just get to the nucleus, mess up the DNA, and get out of there before that thing realizes what we're doing."

Blossom shook her head. "No… I won't let you go by yourselves until I c-can fly and fight."

Buttercup frowned. "Blossom, look at yourself. You're barely holding it at this point. And even then, are you telling me you don't believe we c—"

"No!" she interrupted her immediately. "I just… I don't…"

She glanced at Bubbles. "B-bubbles already took a risk by p-patrolling at night by herself, Buttercup. The d-difference here is that you're going somewhere dangerous, where literally everything that makes up that monster wants all of u-us dead—there's no surprise factor here, no chance that we can do it unseen. Nobody knew what Bubbles was doing… however, he _knows_ when w-we're inside his body… that's for sure."

She turned to the Devourer. As if it was listening to them, the monster let out another roar, and this time the girls were close enough to feel the sound wave going through the air nearby. "I also was the only one who saw the nucleus. So, I can spot it and lead you there once I see it in the body."

The other two girls kept their silence for a few seconds, then Bubbles came closer as well. She bit her lip, then let out, "I… I'm just worried, and scared, Blossom… I don't want something bad to happen to you."

"I'll b-be okay…"

"Let us go first this time at least, if you really want to go," Buttercup said. "Let's do it this way; we keep the spheres and the creatures that are inside that thing under control and away from you, and meanwhile you look around for the nucleus. And don't look at me like that. You know you can't keep up a good fight in this state, Bloss."

Blossom let out a sigh, then nodded. "O-okay. You two go first, I'll be right behind you."

Buttercup nodded, then motioned Bubbles to go beside her. Once they were ready, they turned towards the Devourer.

"Hey! Amoeba Boy!" Buttercup shouted.

That effectively gained the attention of the Devourer, somehow. Him did say the thing had understood his words… as unreliable as his version of the event was.

"I don't know how you've been feeling all these years, locked inside those three idiots… but you know what? I think I liked them far better than you. I guess that, no matter how stupid they were… they were still smarter than you!"

The Devourer roared and growled, and tried once again to go after them, only to retreat once it touched the water. It also tried to extend pseudopodia and shot more lysosomes, but the girls were out of range of any attack type the monster used, even if barely.

"Why are you taunting him?" Bubbles asked.

"Getting insulted should be the least of his worries," Buttercup said. She let herself don a little mischievous smile. "However, if Amoeba Father stays mad enough at us that he doesn't realize what we plan to do… I think we can let him growl and throw a fit as much as he wants."

"Okay, Buttercup, but k-keep it down for now. We don't want him to literally throw everything he has at us yet," Blossom instructed.

Bubbles turned her head a little, glancing at her sister. "You ready, Blossom?"

She nodded, though her forehead was furrowed. She looked away, squinting her eyes to hide her facial expression. "As soon as I s-say the order, Bubbles, we go in."

While Bubbles turned back to the monster, Blossom thought about her current state. She knew Buttercup was right. The biting pain of the burns was getting worse and worse by the minute—it was unlike any injury she'd gotten in the past, and her healing powers just were not helping. And this was just one way the Devourer had hurt them. There was no way to tell what else lurked in the cytoplasm…

No, these thoughts weren't doing any good for her or her sisters. She needed to locate the nucleus, they needed find the DNA. The monster Him had unleashed needed to be taken out here and now, before it could duplicate itself and become unstoppable.

Taking in a breath, Blossom looked towards the coast and braced herself.

"LET'S GO!"


End file.
